Transportation Security Administration Pay Act of 2026

Mr. President, I appreciate the passion that my friend and colleague the distinguished Senator from the State of Nevada puts into her job, into scrutinizing legislation. I appreciate the concerns she has expressed.

Now, if I believed all of the things that she said, well, just about any of the things that she said, I would be concerned too. Fortunately, for all of us, the things that she is saying about this bill are either, in some instances, incomplete, leaving out material information to complete the picture, resulting in a much different impact than has been suggested or, in other cases, they are completely wrong.

Go back to a few first principles about what the bill actually does. There are two basic precepts in the bill, and the fundamental purpose of them is to make it easy to vote and harder to cheat.

We do that through two principled mechanisms in the bill: One requires proof of citizenship upon voter registration, and the other requires voter ID at the time and place of voting.

Now, as to the citizenship component, contrary to what was being suggested briefly for a moment, you know, I would almost like to believe from some of her remarks that this would require Americans en masse to go and immediately reregister.

Perhaps I misunderstood her on that part, if I did, my apologies, but just so that there is no ambiguity at all, so that we are very clear on what it is that it does and what it is that it does not do, it doesn't require mass reregistration. If you have already registered to vote, there is nothing about that that is going to invalidate your voter registration.

If you move to another State or otherwise have to register to vote as you would if you have to move, for example, from one State to another, then you will have to register at that point. But there is nothing about your existing registration that is going to be nullified just because this bill becomes law.

And on the point of the proof of citizenship, there has been a lot of misunderstanding, some of it in good faith. Although the bill itself has just been characterized by my friend and colleague from Nevada as ``beyond bad faith'' and ``vile,'' those are pretty sweeping accusations, and I don't ever make those lightly on any piece of legislation. If I do, I am prepared to back them up. Those can't be backed up here.

There is nothing about this that is in bad faith. There is nothing about this that is vile. This is dealing with a very commonsense problem, a problem that has been many decades in the making--decades in the making ever since, in some ways, Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act, NVRA, in 1993, the motor voter law.

At the time, it was understood that we could allow participating States--which nearly all States participate--to set up a process whereby voters could, while applying for a driver's license at the local DMV, also register to vote. After all, it involves some of the same information to establish who you are, whether you apply for a driver's license and also when you register to vote.

There are some things that have happened since then that have changed the landscape.

One of them has been that 20 years after the enactment of the NVRA, the Supreme Court, in a case called Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, concluded that the NVRA preempts out the States ability to even request any type of documentation or other proof of citizenship. Even if they are aware of circumstances suggesting that some would-be voters are, in fact, not citizens, they are prohibited from doing so.

Remember, all you have to do under the NVRA form is sign your name after checking a box, saying: Yes, I would like simultaneously to register to vote. So, if the States are then prohibited from even inquiring into citizenship--attempting to document it, to prove it, or otherwise--then there is no way to make this happen. As a result of that, it leaves open this open, gaping wound. We now have an estimated 30 million-plus noncitizens residing in this country.

That leads to another development that is relevant to this.

Over the years, there were differences of opinion between the States as to whether, to what extent, and in what circumstances to offer driver's licenses to noncitizens. In some cases, they would issue them to noncitizens as long as they were lawfully here. In other cases, they wouldn't issue them to any. Over the years, it has evolved to the point where, in nearly every State, you can get a driver's license as a noncitizen; and in 19 States, plus the District of Columbia, you can get a driver's license even if you are in the United States unlawfully.

So, in light of that fact and in light of the Supreme Court ruling in 2013 saying that the States, even if they have reason to believe some voters are not eligible because they are not citizens--and they can't look into it further because the NVRA, supposedly, preempted them out. As wrong as I think that ruling was as a matter of statutory interpretation, it is conclusive, and it stands to this day. Then you add to that the fact that we had an estimated 10 to 15 million people enter the country unlawfully between 2021 and 2025.

When you add all that up together--and it becomes even more startling--you realize that, in several States, they made a decision to allow noncitizens to vote in some local elections. In those cases, there is still voter registration that goes into that, and those States, along with the most blue States in America, have refused to enter into any kind of memorandum of understanding or otherwise cooperate or enter into a cooperative agreement with Federal Agencies to ascertain whether, to what extent, and under what circumstances there might be noncitizens registered to vote in their States, nor have they been willing to cooperate with the Federal authorities who manage the so-called SAVE database within the Department of Homeland Security. They haven't been willing to show them any methodology or any techniques that they use in those particular States that allow some noncitizen voting to occur in local elections. They have done nothing to show how it is that they separate out those voter registration files from the voter registration files of those who are eligible to vote in Federal elections. This creates a genuine vulnerability, one that we couldn't, in good faith, just overlook and pretend doesn't exist.

Let me just say that, insofar as people find concerns with the methods that we have allowed you to use when establishing your citizenship at the time of voter registration, if we have left out some form of documentation that should have been included to make this easier, let us know. I would love to consider that. But the truth is, we were very inclusive with it.

One important thing to keep in mind is that this is not the only circumstance in which Americans are routinely required to establish their citizenship. Perhaps the most familiar one on the books currently exists in the context of labor and employment.

Every time any American starts a new job with a new employer inside the United States, he or she is required to fill out a form called the I-9. When you fill out the I-9, if you are an American, then you have to prove that you are a citizen. It is a pretty rigid, fairly inflexible standard. One technique involves showing a U.S. passport establishing citizenship. Another involves a combination of a birth certificate, a photo ID, a Social Security card, et cetera, but that is about it. That is about as far as the options go.

There are additional options that we have worked into the SAVE America Act, including, for example, that subset of Real ID driver's licenses. Not all Real ID driver's licenses establish citizenship. Some of them do; some of them don't. If you happen to have one of those that establishes that, you can accept that. Certain Tribal membership cards are also eligible because they establish citizenship. Not all of them do. We try to identify those that do.

But most importantly--and this is the part that often goes overlooked--when we hear comments from the other side of the aisle in this Chamber, it is that there is a catchall provision dealing with all of these circumstances and any deficit that we may have left out.

It also deals with the problem of those who maybe can't find some other documentation. Let's say, if you are

someone who has gotten married and you have changed your name after getting married and you have got the rest of your documents but you can't find your marriage certificate, we have got you taken care of.

The same provision in the same part of the bill also deals with individuals who may have lost all of their documentation either because it was eaten by their dog or maybe their house burned down yesterday and all of their documents are missing or because they never had them to begin with or their crazy Aunt Madge, for no reason at all, scooped up all the documents, took them to the landfill, disposed of them, and nobody can find them--or maybe you just never had them to begin with for whatever reason. These things happen.

This bill doesn't cast any judgment about these people. This bill doesn't desire, in any way, shape, or form, to disenfranchise those people or to make them ineligible to register to vote. In fact, it makes it incredibly easy.

The provision to which I am referring to often goes overlooked. More or less, universally, it goes overlooked from across the aisle. It starts on page 12 of the House-passed SAVE America Act, which we are debating right now. The bill on the table, at page 12, line 22, and following through the text going on to the next page, makes clear that, even if you are missing some of your documentation or even all of it-- regardless of the reason--and you want to register to vote, you can still do so by writing out an affidavit. It establishes a process whereby a stock affidavit structure could be recommended by a committee that has long existed to help facilitate some of these election issues. Each State would then fine-tune the process that they would utilize in their State whereby the would-be voter writes out a sworn statement, under penalty of perjury, outlining the circumstances that give them citizenship--meaning, if they were born in the United States or are otherwise natural born citizens of the United States--perhaps if they were born outside but to U.S. citizen parents residing abroad at the moment--and were at the moment of their birth, by virtue of the circumstances of their birth, entitled to birthright citizenship as of the moment of their birth, then they are natural born citizens. They can establish those basic facts.

Then the burden falls upon the State to confirm or refute the truthfulness of those things. States have access to databases by which they can compare and contrast what the voter says in the affidavit, saying: Yes, I don't have my documents, but I am a citizen, and here is why and here are the relevant dates or date ranges to consider. It becomes the State's burden. No American citizen need shell out a single dollar.

This is one of the other arguments that I frequently hear raised: that not every American has a passport.

Well, yes, that is true.

They also go on to say: Well, a passport costs money--about 200 bucks.

That is also true.

Nobody should have to go out and get a passport just to vote. If they have got one, great--it makes it easy to establish citizenship--but you don't need to have one. You don't have to shell out a single dime to register to vote under this bill, nor do you have to go out and get duplicate documents or be left out in the cold because you can't find your documents or they never existed or you never had them or your house burned down. Whatever the case, this is taken care of; but this, too, was ignored by my friend and colleague, the distinguished Senator from Nevada.

This question is startling because we hear over and over again how people are going to be left out in the cold. Yet every American who has ever had a job as an employee with an American company in the United States of America has had to establish their citizenship under standards using documents that are far less forgiving, far more rigid, far less flexible than what we allow here.

Now, look, it is theoretically possible--not likely but theoretically possible--that there are other ways of establishing citizenship not yet contemplated in this bill that would still do the job. If so, bring those ideas forward. Help us improve the bill. We would be happy to do it. I think we have made it as easy as we possibly could have. I would love to hear those ideas, but that is not what we are hearing. They are, instead, wanting to engage in scaremongering tactics in order to make people fear that they are suddenly going to be disenfranchised; that they are suddenly going to face what some are really disingenuously calling a poll tax and dishonestly suggesting that this will cost anyone money. There is not a reason for anyone to shell out a single dime, a single nickel, a single penny--or fraction thereof--in order to register to vote.

So, when we look at the proof of citizenship, it is simply not fair to point to any one of these documents in isolation and explain the reasons that some people might not have them, might never have had them, might have lost them, and why it is such a travesty that people will be disenfranchised without them unless they either spend money or spend days or weeks hunting down all the relevant documentation because there are other, easier ways to establish that. If you have got ways of making it even easier, while satisfying this demand that we make sure that only those who are citizens are voting, let's bring them forward.

It is curious, moreover, in getting back to the States--not just the States in which they currently allow lawful votes to be cast in some local elections by known admitted noncitizens. But beyond that, there is a wide range of States, mostly with Democrat Governors and/or Democrat legislatures, that are refusing to cooperate at all with Federal authorities to share anything about their voter registration files, to share the information to make sure that those voting in Federal elections are, in fact, U.S. citizens.

Now, look, this is part of the cooperative federalism model that is built into the Constitution itself. There are certain responsibilities that belong to the U.S. Government, and it is as equally important to respect those powers that are distinctively, unavoidably, necessarily, and by the text and structure of the Constitution, Federal. It is important to keep those in Federal hands just as it is important to reserve to the States the powers that are reserved to the States, not under Federal and not prohibited to the States by the Constitution. Both are equally important to federalism, and bad things happen when we disrespect either.

Under article I of the Constitution, we have the power--it is our authority, and I believe it is our duty--to set basic terms and conditions relevant specifically to these Federal elections--elections for the U.S. House of Representatives and elections to the U.S. Senate. Those are, after all, Federal races.

And which government is it--the State or local level?--that ascertains and has records sufficient to establish, confirm, or refute citizenship?

Well, it is this government.

In fact, one of the very first provisions of article I, section 8 of the Constitution--outlining Federal power by outlining the powers granted to Congress--involves laws dealing with, you know, immigration, naturalization, and citizenship. It is this government that is the only Government of the United States--no one State has the capacity to do that--to establish or refute the existence of citizenship.

So why are so many States that happen to be run by the Democratic Party refusing entirely to cooperate--to enter into memoranda of understanding or otherwise cooperate--with Federal Agencies whose job it is to go through and figure out who is and who is not a citizen for the purpose of voting in Federal elections?

That, too, is another reason we need the SAVE America Act. It is because this is chaos if we don't do that. If we don't do that, then our laws are dead letter. Our law is saying that only U.S. citizens may vote, and if a non-U.S. citizen votes in a Federal election, he or she has committed a serious felony offense.

People often will point to the dearth, the paucity, the rarity of instances in which voter fraud--particularly voter fraud based on noncitizen voting--has been detected, charged, fully prosecuted, and resulted in a conviction. Yes, these are few. These are very, very few overall that have happened, and there are reasons it is very few. When you have a system of laws in place, it makes it very easy to register to vote even for those who might not be citizens, and it makes it impossible for a

State to even inquire, even where actual doubts exist, as to someone's citizenship. You make it almost impossible to detect and very, very difficult to prosecute.

Voting is, moreover, something that happens in a finite time and place. Most of the time, by the time it all happens, the matter is moot, and so it can be difficult to move on.

This is why sometimes I will compare this to when people say that we don't need to put these procedures in place because it is already against the law for noncitizens to vote and therefore they don't vote and that is why it is so rare.

That is a little bit like saying we don't need laws that require liquor stores to make people show ID before they buy alcohol because we already have laws prohibiting the sale of alcoholic beverages to children. If we didn't have ID laws or record keeping requirements in place for such things, that, too, would be very, very difficult--close to impossible--to detect and enforce and prosecute and result in convictions.

So, look, this debate will continue. I look forward to hearing any contributions, any suggestions as to how we could make it better, more inclusive. But the status quo in which we simply pretend that this does not happen is untenable.

We already know, based on the handful of States that have started their own investigations, that there are thousands just in the last year or two alone. We learned of thousands of voter registration files that have existed that have involved noncitizens.

With as many noncitizens as have entered this country recently and the development of our laws, it would be folly, it would be morally irresponsible for us to assume this does not happen.

But let's keep our debate focused on truth, on facts, on what the bill actually says and not on what it doesn't say.

Mr. President, I appreciate the passion and the remarks provided by my friend and colleague the distinguished Senator from Delaware.

I do feel the need to respond to a couple of things, and a couple of things that were said previous to that by the Senator from Michigan.

With regard to the Senator from Delaware, there are a number of claims made that are very serious; and because they are very serious, they need to be responded to immediately.

She used terms like ``poll tax,'' ``Jim Crow 2.0,'' talking about adding costs as if we are charging someone to be able to have ballot access to be able to vote, which would be a poll tax. We ended that some 60 years ago by a constitutional amendment. This is not that.

Not only are we not charging someone to vote, but we are not charging someone to register to vote; nor are the documentary requirements in place anything that would cost any individual any money at all. It would not cost them a single penny because even if you don't have every document that you need in order to establish citizenship, something that is already required by a whole host of other laws--familiar to most Americans would be in the labor and employment context, where every time you start a new job as an American citizen, in the United States as an employee, you have to fill out an I-9 form, and you have to provide a very specific set of documents to establish citizenship. You may do so with a U.S. passport establishing citizenship. If you don't have a U.S. passport, you may do so with a birth certificate, together with a photo ID. A Social Security card can also come into play, but it is a fairly limited set.

What we have established in this bill is far more flexible than that. We have added a bunch of other documents. We tried to be as expansive and as inclusive as humanly possible in order to do

that. And then we provided a failsafe--a failsafe that I have yet to hear any of my colleagues across the aisle refer to when making these very aggressive accusations that this is a poll tax, that this is Jim Crow 2.0, or that this is going to disenfranchise women or people of particular racial minorities. It is just not true.

They are ignoring the existence of the provision that begins on line 22, page 12, of the bill and continues onto the next page, which says that if for any reason or no reason at all you don't have the necessary documents--any of them or all of them; you have none of them--you can still handle this by an affidavit that you can write out, thus putting the burden on the State to confirm or refute the underlying facts establishing your citizenship, whether citizenship through natural born citizen status, by virtue of the circumstances at your birth, at the time of your birth, making you a citizen or the circumstances that led to your naturalization; you were a naturalized citizen. That does not cost anyone a single dollar, and it puts the burden on the State to track down the necessary background so that the State can certify you.

So these arguments are not only missing the point; they become aggressively wrong to the point of just being flatout false, demonstrably false.

So we can hear this over and over and over again, but it doesn't change the fact that, in the bill, nobody is charged a thing to vote-- not one person. And so when we hear about this being costly, that just isn't true.

Likewise, another comment was made by my colleague from Delaware referring to a vote-by-mail provision, referring to some more sweeping changes that are made in a separate amendment that are not part of this bill right now. This bill has two principal provisions. One deals with establishing proof of citizenship at the time of voter registration. The other deals with photo ID at the time of voting.

This one doesn't do that. Yes, one or more amendments have been filed that would expand that to include some significant restrictions on mail-in balloting. That is not what is being debated on the floor right now. I have no objection to anybody wanting to raise those now, given that the amendments have been filed and there has been some talk of this. But just to be clear, the bill on the floor doesn't contain those.

I also need to respond to a couple of the more egregious points that were made by the preceding Senator, the Senator from Michigan. Among other things, she repeated some of the same false accusations that this would somehow disenfranchise married women. It absolutely, emphatically, would not. In addition to making it very easy for someone who has all the other documentation but maybe doesn't have a marriage certificate backing up the name change or maybe they are missing all of them, again, you go back to page 12, line 22. Any person, whether they have changed their name or are missing some of their documentation or all of it, may establish it by affidavit, putting the burden back on the State elections official.

The Senator from Michigan also made some curious claims with regard to the Constitution, with regard to federalism and the relationship between States and the Federal Government. Among other things, she insisted that the Founding Fathers--those who wrote the Constitution, those who ratified it--were emphatic about the fact that they did not want, as she put it, the Federal Government running elections. Well, there is some truth to that, but her ultimate conclusion is 180 degrees opposite of what the Constitution says and what they did and what the words say, though it is very important for us to do this to make sure that we are talking about the same things.

So if you go to the Constitution--go to article I, section 4, clause 1. It doesn't talk about them because it doesn't need to talk about them, the States conducting their own elections for State offices. That goes without saying that the States are in charge of that. But it does talk--in article I, section 4, clause 1--about the fact that the State governments will be in charge of setting up rules and regulations governing the conduct of elections for Federal officials. And it also says, right after that, in the very same sentence, ``but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations,'' and that is what we are doing here.

Because these involve Federal offices, we have the authority to set important terms and conditions specifically for Federal offices. It is not that we are encroaching on any constitutional power; this is our power. It may lay dormant insofar as we choose not to exercise it. But it is not currently dormant. In fact, we legislated on a number of occasions; and there are at least four or five, maybe six major pieces of existing Federal law that deal specifically with the States' conduct of Federal elections, separate and apart from another very serious Federal criminal penalty that makes it a felony for a noncitizen to vote in a U.S. election.

So in all these respects, the Congress can, it may, it is expressly authorized to legislate, and it has indeed legislated. Among other things, it legislated with the NVRA, passed in 1993.

It is the NVRA specifically and the manner in which it has been interpreted by the Supreme Court and implemented that necessitates these provisions--specifically, the citizenship provisions--of the SAVE America Act because but for the Supreme Court's ruling in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona in 2013, a case decided some 20 years after the NVRA was enacted by Congress in 1993, the Court in that case said the States may not even inquire into someone's citizenship, may not require proof of it even where they suspect that some voters might be noncitizens.

Now, that interpretation was wrong. It was contrary to the text, to the structure, to the original public meaning of that statute. It was wrong, but it is nonetheless conclusive. It is a majority opinion of the Supreme Court. It hasn't been overturned. And that is why this is necessary.

So to call this a federalism problem, to call this an overreach by the U.S. Government into the exclusive domain of the States, is literally not true. Why? Well, because in the first place, the Constitution itself makes it Federal, and it is necessarily Federal. I would add to that that that is even more important here because this bleeds into another one of the Federal Government's exclusive powers and exclusive abilities; namely, the ability to identify and ascertain the citizenship of any American citizen.

That is not the role of the States, nor do the States have the comprehensive databases that the Federal Government does have. The Federal Government has the ability, conclusively, to determine whether or not somebody is a citizen. The States do not, and that is yet another important reason for us to make that determination.

It is also relevant that this is where we get into trouble with a number of these blue States--the Democrat Governors and Democrat legislature States--that are refusing even to talk to the Federal authorities who run the SAVE database within the Department of Homeland Security.

Remember, it is against the law for a noncitizen to vote in a Federal election, and that is why we have these laws and these systems and this database, the SAVE database, already set up. Yet a number of these blue States--a whole lot of them--are refusing even to talk to Federal authorities, even to share with them what, if anything, that they are doing to make sure that noncitizens are not voting in U.S. elections. This has become a problem of especially great concern in recent years given that, in some States--a handful of at least four or five States and the District of Columbia--now have in place systems where, in some local elections within their State's jurisdiction, noncitizens are openly, by State law, allowed to vote in those elections.

Therefore, when they register to vote, they have a voter registration file. Basic questions have been asked of them: How do you differentiate those who are noncitizens who have registered to vote in your State, and how do you make sure that they don't get ballots to vote in a Federal election; for example, for a U.S. House of Representatives race or a U.S. Senate race?

They have refused to answer the question. They have refused to cooperate. They have hidden these details. These are important details, details that we have constitutional authority,

a moral obligation, and a legal obligation to look into to make sure that our laws are faithfully executed, and they refuse utterly to cooperate. If that is not chilling, I don't know what is.

My friend and colleague from Michigan also implied that there is a--I don't know--some sort of de minimus, marginal concern, in her State and every other State, about noncitizens registering to vote.

Oh, it happens every once in a while. Somebody gets in there. We remove them.

But let's remember--I looked up some articles on this. I have one right here from a publication called the Michigan Bridge. One of the ways that they found a handful of noncitizens registered to vote was in a sort of haphazard way. They found 15 just by doing something very simple. They compared a list of people who had gone into court after being summoned for jury duty. Jury duty, remember, typically turns on what they call the wheel, a random selection from among registered voters in the jurisdiction. You are called up if you are a registered voter, randomly, to serve on jury duty.

Periodically, in Michigan and in many other States, people will show up for jury duty. There are all kinds of tricks that people use to try to avoid jury duty if they don't want to. This one may or may not be a trick in some circumstances, and in many circumstances it wasn't. People were truthfully saying: I am not a citizen; therefore, I may not, must not, cannot, will not serve as a juror.

So somebody came up with the idea: Let's compare a list of--I don't know--250 or so who happened to have made that argument; then they compared them against Michigan's voter registration database. And they found that at least 15 of those individuals were noncitizens who had registered to vote. That is a far cry from saying that there are only 15 noncitizens registered to vote in the State of Michigan, when you consider the haphazard, random way in which they found this out. It would suggest not only that there could be more but that there likely are a lot more because most people aren't getting called in for jury duty, and most who are aren't necessarily invoking this defense of: I can't serve; I won't serve; I may not serve because I am not a U.S. citizen.

Finally, with regard to the federalism point, I find it very curious that this argument continues to surface, and it surfaces, in particular, from our Democratic colleagues. And the reason I say that is that, all of a sudden, they are very concerned about federalism, about maintaining the sanctity of the distinction between that which is State authority and that which is Federal.

That is important to me. I focus on a few things more than that. I think the core structural provisions of the Constitution--the vertical protection that we call federalism and the horizontal protection that we call separation of powers--are as important as any other feature in the Constitution. And when we deviate from those, we cause all kinds of ripples downstream. So I am very sensitive to these issues. I want to avoid any semblance of trampling on States' sovereign authority. This, sir, is not that--and especially when we hear this from those who, just a few years ago, during the Congress that ranged between January 3, 2021, and January 3, 2023, in which both Chambers of Congress were controlled by Democrats and we had a Democratic President, President Biden.

During that time, they supported legislation known as H.R. 1. Now, if you want to see a Federal takeover of elections, H.R. 1 was that. It was vast. It was sweeping. It covered all sorts of things that the Federal Government has no business taking over in elections. Among other things, it would have designated every single voting jurisdiction in the entire United States of America, regardless of what part of the country they were in, regardless of what, if any, history they may have had with past de facto or de jure discrimination or segregation of their State, subjected them all to preclearance; meaning, anytime they passed any law affecting the way votes were cast, precincts were drawn or otherwise, they would have to go to a Democratic political appointee inside the Department of Justice to seek a ``Mother, may I,'' an advance blessing from the Federal sovereign, before they could make those changes.

That is a violation of federalism, and that is something that, last I checked, every Democrat who now serves in the Senate who was here at the time supported. So I am sorry. I am surprised that they would make a federalism argument now in reference to a bill that focuses solely, exclusively on powers that the Federal Government does, in fact, have.

And in fact, the only reason this bill is necessary is because of existing Federal law--the way it has been interpreted and the way that it is being implemented. That is the only reason we need any of this. That is not a federalism problem; that is inappropriate exercise of Federal power.

We do just as much violence to federalism when we deny to the Federal sovereign the ability to exercise Federal power as we do when we do the same to the States.

Madam President, I want to thank my friend and distinguished colleague, the Senator from Ohio, for his observations, for his insights on this. This is one of many true talents we have in the Senate. He is particularly well qualified in this area, given his experience in the State of Ohio with mastering the election laws of that State and the Federal election laws that overlap with State election laws.

I am not sure there is anyone in the Senate, currently or who has ever served here, who has a greater knowledge of these laws and the ways that they intersect.

For the same reasons articulated by the Senator from Ohio, I think this is an exceptionally good idea. It is not every bill where it makes sense to separate out a provision, try to pass that provision on its own, separate from the rest of the text of the bill, but this is one of those instances where it makes sense.

Don't get me wrong. Neither I nor the Senator from Ohio are suggesting that we still don't need the rest of the SAVE America Act. That is not our point.

The point is that these are separately divisible such that they could be enacted separately, and insofar as there is a greater degree of consensus with regard to the voter ID component of the SAVE America Act than there are with regard to the citizenship components, it makes sense for us to get this done now.

Let's pass it. Let's pass it right now. Let's pass it unanimous consent. Let's make this law, and then we can proceed back to deal with the rest of the issues within the SAVE America Act.

This is what progress looks like. This is what consensus building looks like.

And I thank my friend from Ohio for raising this.

Look, no matter how you feel about the rest of the provisions of the bill, it is not too much to ask somebody to show who they are when they show up on voting day. That provision is very simple.

Let's get this passed. Let's get it done right now.

Will the gentleman yield for a question?

--inaccuracy on the bill.

No. No. It is not one. It is many. I am going to focus on--

If you read the text at the beginning on page 12, line 22, which makes clear--

I am asking a question, sir. Are you not willing--

You yielded.

Mr. President, I am so grateful for the remarks of my colleague and friend from the great State of Massachusetts and for his voice on this very important issue.

I rise today as a child of the Civil Rights Movement, as the blessed beneficiary of its bold moral witness in America, and as a member of only the second generation of our Nation to have full and fair access to the right to vote.

Some have argued that in a real sense, our country did not really become a democracy until 1965 when there were those who stood up with courage and challenged the Nation to live up to its ideals.

I stand here today, and I am able to work in this building on behalf of the people of Georgia--what an honor--to represent 11 million people, to carry on this grand experiment called democracy.

But it is never far from our memory that, at the time of my birth, Georgia's two Senators were Richard B. Russell and Herman E. Talmadge. In many ways, they were effective. They brought great things back to the State of Georgia, but we would not be honest, we would not be telling the full story if we did not remember that they were both archsegregationists and unabashed adversaries of the Civil Rights Movement, which sought to expand the electorate to ensure that this is a House where every American--the citizen--has a voice.

Senator Talmadge once said: We love the Negro in his place, and his place is at the backdoor.

Well, it is a testament to the greatness of this country that I sit in his seat because there were those who

stood up to fight for the highest ideals of our country.

I reference that history because it is relevant in this moment. Nearly 62 years ago to the day, those two Georgia Senators, along with other southern Senators, began a weekslong effort to prevent people who look like me and my parents and my children from fully participating in our democracy. They were trying to narrow the electorate. So I find it interesting and ironic that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who have been leading this effort in recent days have referenced this very history which is the cause for my being here in the first place.

One of them pointed out the fact that when we entered the debate about the civil rights legislation and tried to push it into law, that there were those who stood up day after day, week after week, and he dared to enlist that history as if, somehow, that was some inspiration for what they are trying to do in this moment.

Let me be very clear: You are on the other side of that history. You are on the side of those who are trying to narrow the electorate. So, if you want to pass the SAVE Act, that is your prerogative. If you want to argue that folks have to have a birth certificate or a passport just to be able to register to vote in a country where most Americans do not have a passport, if you want to effectively disenfranchise women, disenfranchise poor people, and working-class people who have to struggle for the right to vote, that is your prerogative. But be very clear: You are not on the side of the movement. You are on the other side of that history. Fight for this, if you will, but you ought to leave the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, name out of your mouth.

This country goes through moments where the electorate expands, and then it goes through moments where it contracts. We are in a contraction moment. We are in a moment wherein the words of the administration itself--it was a Cabinet official in the White House herself who said that we just want to make sure ``the right people are voting''--the right people--``the right people are voting.''

That was the argument in the 1960s. Of those who wanted to make sure that the right people were voting, had they prevailed, I would not be standing here today.

I don't believe in the right people. I believe in ``we the people,'' ``we the people,'' ``we the people.'' That is not just the first three words of our charter document. It is a creed--``we the people.''

Every American citizen must have access to the franchise, and it must not be treated as a privilege. It is a right. When you put up unnecessary barriers, you undermine that basic understanding that the franchise is not a privilege; it is a right. I often say that a vote is a kind of prayer for the world we desire for ourselves and for our children, and our prayers are stronger when we pray together. There are no right or wrong people. There are only the American people.

They put up the SAVE Act, arguing that they want to make sure that it is only Americans who are voting, but they have not demonstrated, and they have provided no evidence that voter fraud is a real thing through voter identification. We know that this will disenfranchise thousands, if not millions, of Americans. We have no evidence that this is a problem that actually needs to be solved. Yet they have shut down much of the business of the Senate in order to do this. They are hell-bent on getting this done.

Donald Trump said that this is his No. 1 priority. So it begs the question, Why is this his No. 1 priority?

With all of the things wrong in our country, why is this the main thing that he feels he must get done? Why is he afraid?

I will tell you why. It is because he knows that he has broken every promise he made. He said that he was going to lower your costs. Instead, he has doubled healthcare premiums for 22 million Americans. His tariffs have cost the average family over $1,000 a year. Gas prices are spiking and show no sign of coming down anytime soon, but this is his No. 1 priority.

He said he was going to be the President of peace, but he has attacked 17 countries and counting. Yet again, we find ourselves entangled in another endless war with no endgame and no idea of what victory even looks like.

All the while, we have more important problems right here at home. Donald Trump promised to support our farmers. Instead, he has raised the cost of fertilizer and has hamstrung their exports, and farmers all across Georgia are suffering as a result.

So that is really what this is all about. Donald Trump is a failed President, and his support is collapsing. I hear it all across Georgia--in rural towns bearing the brunt of the President's immigration policies and farmers dealing with the realities of a trade war.

This President claims to be ``America First,'' but in the name of protecting U.S. citizens, his deportation machine has seized over 170 citizens. They have shot and killed two American citizens on a quiet street. I went to stand where they lost their lives. In a real sense, I felt like I was standing on holy ground, made sacred by the blood of patriots who stood up against abusive authority, under the color of law, to remind us that, at the end of the day, this is our country-- ``we the people,'' ``we the people.''

It is not the powerful interests who can write big checks to keep politicians in office--``we the people.'' Not the lobbyists--``we the people.'' Not the American oligarchs--``we the people.''

Now they want to prevent even more citizens from voting, from making our voices heard. They want to block our ability to stand up in November and say: Enough is enough.

So the President is panicking. He is doing what he always does. He is attacking our elections so that you cannot fire his foot soldiers in Congress. It is pathetic. He looks to me like a scared human being who knows that behind the curtain is a tiny man. We will not be intimidated. Our voices will not be silenced.

The President continues to push the lies that he spread, after he lost in 2020, to create a pretext to interfere in the midterm elections. That is why we saw an FBI raid in Fulton County, GA.

As I watched that FBI raid, I saw the Director of National Intelligence crouched in a corner, talking on a mobile phone, and I wondered, Why was she there? There were bomb threats in polling stations in poor and Black neighborhoods during the 2024 election, which were later traced back to Russian interference. I am still waiting on an answer from her on that.

There she was, engaged in this effort to count the ballots again in the 2020 election, even after the President's own Justice Department found no evidence of meaningful voter fraud. These claims about voter fraud--that is the fraud. That is the fraud. And I think Americans are growing tired of it.

You know, the wonderful thing about our country is that we get to have the argument. The Presiding Officer and I don't agree on a whole range of things, but I just want us to be able to have the argument. It gets rambunctious in the American public square in order to avoid violence, but at the end of the day, everybody gets to go to the polls, and the most powerful words in the democracy are: ``The people have spoken.''

So I will always cast my lot on the side of democracy. I am hopeful in this regard. I believe in the people. I want to make sure my constituents' voices are heard--all of my constituents--even when they don't agree with me, even when I don't get the outcome that I want.

When I think about the nature of human power and human pride--forgive me, but I am a preacher after all--and human sin and our desire to make sure that we slant things so that we get the outcome we want--we see it not just in governments; you see it in your own family--the question becomes, How do you balance all of those things? I think democracy is the best we have got. Given who we are as human beings, I will cast my lot with the people's voice, even when I think they have gotten it wrong. I would rather put my trust there.

Reinhold Niebuhr, perhaps, put it best. He said that human kind's capacity for justice makes democracy possible. Our capacity for injustice makes democracy necessary.

At the end of the day the thing that can fix it, whatever issue we have, I believe, is the people's voice. And so I am

disturbed about what I am witnessing. I am disturbed about an attack on Fulton County and in Maricopa County, AZ. It troubles me when ICE lands in Minneapolis, and then the administration says that we are there to deal with violent criminals, we are there to deal with this immigration issue. But then when it comes down to it, the administration says: Do you really want ICE out of your community? Hand over your voter rolls.

Come on, man. I don't care whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, come on. You can see what this is about. What do voter rolls have to do with violent criminals? What kind of ransom note is that to send to the leaders of the people of Minneapolis?

And so the Big Lie continues to live and we need to kill it once and for all and the only thing that can do that is the people's voice.

The President continues to spread conspiracy theories and outright lies. Here is the reality: This bill will disenfranchise thousands, if not millions, of Americans, and that is why they want to pass it so desperately. They are using onerous citizenship verification as a pretext for voter suppression, requiring you to use a birth certificate or passport to register to vote.

And under this bill, a driver's license wouldn't be enough to register to vote. They ought to call the bill what it is. They ought to call it ``A Driver's License is Not Good Enough Act.'' They call it the SAVE Act, but the question is: What are they trying to save? They are not trying to save our elections; they are trying to save their own power at any cost--at the cost of the voices of ordinary people.

Let's think about this in practical terms. If you change addresses, even if you move down the street and you have been voting for years, do you want to have to track down your birth certificate--which you lost while you were moving--in order to register to vote?

You get married and you change your name, you have to go find your marriage license and a birth certificate or a passport to prove that you are a citizen.

More than half of Georgians, or 5.4 million people, lack a valid passport. And as many as 2.2 million women in Georgia may not have their birth certificate that matches their current legal name.

And so women are disproportionately disenfranchised by this piece of legislation, which again is a solution in search of a problem that does not exist.

Let me be really clear. Noncitizens should never vote in our elections. There is no argument about that. But this legislation will only make it harder for eligible American voters to make their voices heard. That is the actual work that this legislation will do.

We know that about 760,000 voting-age Georgians who are U.S. citizens would have difficulty showing documentation proving their citizenship. We know that.

By the way, we have voter ID in Georgia. And I will tell you, for the record, that I think you should have to prove that you are who you say you are before you vote. I support voter ID. We have voter ID laws in my State. You should have to prove that you are who you say you are before you vote. That is basic, but that is not what this is about.

This is about onerous voter ID requirements used as a pretext and as a tool for voter suppression because there are those in the administration who want to make sure ``the right people vote.'' There are currently strong laws on the books that keep noncitizens from voting. They face criminal prosecution and deportation if they vote.

So let's just think about the risk-reward analysis, the cost-benefit analysis. You will be criminally prosecuted if you try to vote and you are not a citizen. You are trying to tell me that folks will risk criminal prosecution in droves to change the potential outcome of an election? Are you trying to tell me that folks will try to vote twice? It is hard enough to get folks to vote once, let alone twice.

And that is probably why Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger found only 20 instances of noncitizens registered out of 8.2 million in Georgia--8.2 million people registered to vote in Georgia. The Republican secretary of state found 20 instances of noncitizens who were registered and only 9 had ever attempted to vote and the majority did so before 2012. This is a solution in search of a problem that does not exist.

And so this means that the SAVE America Act would burden or disenfranchise over 150,000 Georgians for every single instance of a noncitizen voting in the last decade. Does that make sense? You keep 1 noncitizen from voting and you disenfranchise 150,000 for every 1? You are trying to tell me that that makes the democracy stronger? more representative of our interests?

And so if there is no meaningful voter fraud, and if this law is so disastrous for voting citizens, the question is: Why is the President so desperate to sign the SAVE America Act into law? And I mean, he is desperate, so desperate that he has threatened his own Republican caucus, said: If you all don't do this, we are not going to do anything.

The President is trying to take away your right to vote so he can hold onto power, and Washington Republicans are trying to help him do it. They are using the SAVE America Act as a pretext for voter suppression. They know their policies are deeply unpopular with the American people, but instead of working to change their policies, instead of working to get more people access to the healthcare that they need, they are taking healthcare away from 15 million Americans. Instead of working to lower the cost of groceries, they are instituting reckless tariff taxes that make everything more expensive. Instead of actually working on behalf of the American people, they are working to change who can vote in the next election.

And so we are going to stand up. I am certainly going to stand up for all of my constituents, and I mean that. I want the Georgians who are in red districts to know that I am fighting for you and your voice because this administration's so-called SAVE America Act will disenfranchise many of my constituents in red districts. That is because, increasingly, the people's voices are being squeezed out of their democracy. It is the folks with a lot of money, it is the corporate interests that they want to hear from.

And you are living right now with what happens when your voice is diminished. I see it. I see it in rural red counties that I visit all the time where their rural hospital is either closed or it is almost near closing because they cut a trillion dollars out of Medicaid. I see it in the eyes of farmers who are burdened by these tariff taxes and how it is creating damage and wreckage for their businesses.

I saw it the other day in Social Circle, GA, where the administration is determined to put a 10,000-bed ICE detention center in a town of 5,000 people--5,000 people--in Social Circle, GA. The administration went in, bought a warehouse for $128 million, and the mayor, the city manager, the leadership of Social Circle, GA, learned that there would be a detention center in their town that would triple the size of their town by reading about it in the Washington Post.

So think about that. The mayor, elected to represent his people. The big, bad Federal Government comes in under cover of night and ambushes the duly-elected local officials because they didn't want to hear their voice. They were determined to bring this warehouse to their town whether they like it or not.

I am fighting for those people, even though it is, by and large, a red district. I don't have a lot of votes in Social Circle, GA, but I am a pastor first. I told the people of Georgia that I would fight for them, that I would walk with them even as I work for them. This is about the voices of ordinary people. This is about saving our democracy.

As I close--and nobody believes a Baptist preacher when he says ``as I close,'' but I am not trying to break any records today. Andrew Young tells me the story of when they passed the civil rights bill into law.

Dr. King and his lieutenants went to see President Johnson. The President was feeling good--and he should. They had passed the civil rights bill into law after that long filibuster that I talked about at the beginning of this speech. They passed the civil rights bill into law, and Dr. King and his lieutenants went to see the President, and Dr. King

said: I am glad we got that civil rights bill into law. Without skipping a beat, he said: Now we need a voting rights law. He wasn't going to let the President bask too long in the glory of that victory. He said: That is great, but my people can't vote in the South. I need a voter rights law, and I need it yesterday.

The President said to Martin Luther King, Jr.: You are right. I get it. But I just can't get that done right now. I don't have the power.

They left the meeting, and the staff was feeling all demoralized and dejected, and they said to Dr. King: What are we going to do? The President said he doesn't have the power.

Dr. King just sort of shrugged his shoulders and said: Well, if the President doesn't have the power, I guess we are going to have to go and find him some.

Think about that. He was just a Baptist preacher, wasn't elected to anything. He was not a U.S. Senator, certainly not the President of the United States. But he said: We are going to go and find the President some power.

Dr. King understood and those who were around him understood that it is not about the people in power; it is about the power that is in the people.

So the people are standing up in this moment, and I am standing with them. No to the so-called SAVE Act; yes to saving our democracy.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I am so grateful for the leadership of Senator Schumer, and he speaks for all of us.

The thing that we have in common on both sides of the aisle is that my colleagues and I travel back and forth from this city to our home States every week. Airplanes are our other office.

So every week I fly here or fly back home. I pass by hard-working agents of the TSA. I get to see their dedication up close, their professionalism. They are public service in action, and they are working long hours around the clock every day of the year.

Wherever we are trying to go, our TSA agents get us there safely; safely to work, safely back to our families, wherever the public is trying to go. And these public servants sacrifice their holidays, their special moments with their families so that we can get to our families.

They work nights and weekends to make sure that we in this Chamber and the millions of Americans that travel from our Nation's airports can do that without fear.

So this is basic. No one should be fooling around with the TSA agents. We have our differences, our debates in this Chamber, but for the second time of the year, our TSA workers are working without pay because of Washington dysfunction.

Here is what I believe: I believe that if you are working-- particularly, during a government shutdown--then you should be fully paid. I believe this so much that I have broken with Members of my own party to vote to pay all Federal workers, which includes TSA officers, during government shutdowns.

I think it is simply wrong for my Republican colleagues to use these hard-working Americans as leverage, as pawns, in what they are presenting as a false choice to the American people.

Here is the choice that they are presenting to us. They are saying to us: Either shut down the government, denying working people the money that

they have earned, or vote to continue to support the President's paramilitary force that is wreaking havoc in our streets and killing ordinary citizens for exercising their First Amendment rights.

That is a false choice--one I simply cannot accept--and it confounds common sense.

The time is always right, as Dr. King used to say, to do what is right. So I am calling on this Chamber to pay TSA workers right now before we, again, all head to the airports. Let's keep having this debate, but pay the TSA workers.

So with that, Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. 4127, the Transportation Security Administration Pay Act, that the bill be considered read a third time and passed, and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

I object.

Mr. President, let me be very clear. Our differences here are differences in principle, and they have real consequences on the streets of America in realtime right now.

This is not just some theoretical argument. This is not about politics. This is about the people.

I disagree fundamentally that we ought to have an unaccountable paramilitary force wreaking havoc on the streets of our country. ICE, as Trump has remade it, is killing American citizens.

And I can't pretend like that is not happening. I stood where Renee Good was shot and killed while her vehicle was driving away. I stood where Alex Pretti lost his life while just trying to defend and protect a woman who we all saw being abused by ICE agents in realtime.

And so this idea that we either have to fund that or shut the government down is a false choice. Republicans have the majority in the Senate. They have the majority in the House. They have the White House. We can pay our workers right now.

By the way, ICE already has more than enough money. They gave ICE $75 billion in the ``One Big Ugly Bill.''

Let me put that in perspective. In terms of funding, ICE is now bigger than the U.S. Marines, and my Republican friends are saying to me and saying to my colleagues that if you don't give this overgrown paramilitary force of masked agents jumping out of unmarked cars more money, we are going to leave TSA workers and others unpaid.

I think that is patently unfair. I think we ought to fund the Federal workers; we ought to fund FEMA, the Coast Guard. We ought to fund Homeland Security while we have a principled argument about what is happening with ICE, because what is happening there gets to the very basic things that I learned in my ninth grade civics class about the engagement between law enforcement and ordinary citizens every single day. And what we are witnessing, in this moment, is unacceptable.

Pay the TSA workers. That is my offer. That is my request. And, therefore, I object to the Senator's modification.

Mr. President, I very much appreciate the Reverend Senator Warnock and his reminder that questions about voting in America are moral questions, they are historic questions, and they are questions about our democracy. I am grateful for his leadership on this, and I hope all of us have a chance--if we didn't get to hear the speech the first time around, that we will get to replay it and listen to what he has to say.

Donald Trump is trying to stop American citizens from voting. Why? Because he knows that his agenda is unpopular and that Republicans can't win based on what he is doing, so he wants to rig the election by picking his own voters. That is what the SAVE Act is all about.

Don't let Trump and the Republicans in Congress fool you. They will say things like: Hey, you should have to show an ID to vote just like you have to do to buy a beer.

But this is not an ordinary voter ID bill. This is not a bill that says everybody either has to show a driver's license or a student ID to vote. This is a way to keep American citizens from voting, and I will just give you one example of this.

If this bill passes, then in 45 of the 50 States, your driver's license won't count as a valid ID. And then it gets better. Let's say you are a married woman who lives in Massachusetts. Let's say that when you got married, you took your husband's name. Well, when you go to the polls to vote, you can't register by showing them your updated driver's license. Why? Because Massachusetts is one of the 45 States where a driver's license does not prove citizenship.

So you bring along your birth certificate. It shows you were born in the United States. Can you vote now? Nope. Your birth certificate is still under your maiden name.

So, yes, you can use a passport if you have one, but, remember, fewer than half of all Americans have a passport, and it costs $165 to get one, and it takes a month or two if everything is working on time.

No passport and no birth certificate that matches your driver's license--well, Trump and the Republicans say you are just out of luck. And that is just one example of how this bill will actually make it harder for Americans to vote.

Here is another deeply disturbing thing about this bill. It would require States to hand over sensitive information about voters to Trump's Department of Homeland Security so that some shadowy guys can do whatever they want with it. Maybe they take you off the voters rolls. Maybe they use that information for something else. The point is, nobody really knows what will happen.

This is an Agency whose former leader, Kristi Noem, said just a few weeks ago:

[W]e need to . . . make sure that we have the right people

voting.

So just make a guess who is going to get swept off the voter rolls. People that the Republicans think are likely to vote Democratic. So sweep off Black people. Sweep off Brown people. Sweep off women. Sweep off students. Sweep off people in precincts that voted Democratic last time. Sweep off people that you think might vote Democratic in the upcoming election.

I have heard this bill called Jim Crow 2.0, hearkening back to the days in the South when the South blocked Black people from being able to vote with a whole series of tests and barriers so that they just wouldn't have a chance to vote. The Trump bill is Jim Crow 2.0.

Noncitizen voting is extremely rare in America, and the Republicans know that. They have seen the same data that we have. Voter roll audits in Georgia prior to the 2024 election found only 20 registered noncitizens out of 8.2 million registered voters. That is 0.00024 percent. A 2024 Michigan audit found only 16 noncitizen votes out of 5.7 million votes. That is 0.00028 percent.

So then what is going on? Why are the Republicans doing this? Why are they chewing up all of this time in the U.S. Senate to do this? Well, we don't have to guess because the Republicans have been saying the quiet part out loud.

Republicans in Congress know that they are in deep trouble for the midterms unless they can rig the rules and pick their own voters. Donald Trump even said it himself. He said passing the SAVE Act will ``guarantee the midterms,'' because the Republicans know and Donald Trump knows that the policies they are shoving through right now are wildly unpopular.

So while Trump and Republicans try to spread conspiracies and lie about the SAVE Act, it is important that each and every one of us stays focused on what the Trump administration is really doing.

Iran

Mr. President, here is what the Trump administration is really doing: After promising no more wars, Donald Trump has dragged the United States into an illegal and reckless war with Iran. That is lie No. 1. Already, at least 200 American servicemembers have been hurt, and 13 servicemembers have lost their lives. There are American lives lost and families grieving because Donald Trump dragged us into a war based on lies, a war launched without an imminent threat to our country and without any end in sight.

When he ran for President, Trump promised no wars. In fact, he kept saying he would be the ``President of peace.'' He lied.

The United States is spending at least $1 billion a day on the war with Iran. If we put the money we are using at war with Iran toward healthcare, we could lower costs for millions of Americans.

Just this week, Donald Trump's own Energy Secretary said out loud:

We were very aware that we would cause a little bit of

increased prices on Americans.

Think about that. Trump and his top officials knew that this war would raise costs for Americans, and they did it anyway.

In just the first 6 days of the war, the Trump administration spent an estimated $11.3 billion. That was in 6 days. We also lost three F-15 aircraft in just those first few days. That will cost us another $300 million. Estimates say that the Trump administration has kept burning about 1 billion taxpayer dollars a day on the war in Iran, and now we are on day 18. Some estimates look more like $2 billion a day. That is over $23,000 every second, something like $11.5 million since I started this speech.

So let's look at Trump's warmongering by the numbers. Mr. President, $11.3 billion, the estimated cost of the first 6 days of Trump's war; $5.6 billion, the cost of munitions spent by the Pentagon in the first 2 days of the war; $300 million, the cost to replace the three F-15s lost to friendly fire in the first week of the war; $50 billion, how much the Trump administration says it wants to add to an already massively inflated defense budget to pay for a war that was never authorized by Congress; $1 trillion, the Pentagon's budget this year; $1.5 trillion, the total amount Trump is reportedly requesting for the Pentagon budget for next year. That

means Republicans in Congress want to increase the Pentagon's budget by $500 billion.

To put these numbers in context, the Trump administration will spend $30 billion in just the first 30 days of the war. That is exactly how much we could have used to lower costs for millions of people for an entire year--people who got knocked off their healthcare or saw their premiums go up because of Trump's healthcare cuts. So instead of going to war with Iran, we could lower healthcare costs and actually save lives here at home.

Here is one more: $12 billion--a number we have already passed--$12 billion is what it would cost to restore the expanded child tax credit for 1 year. So in less than 2 weeks of Donald Trump's war, we spent the same amount of money that would have lifted millions of kids out of poverty.

For the same amount the United States is burning on just 1 single day of Donald Trump's reckless war with Iran, we could provide a full year's worth of food assistance for nearly half a million Americans or Medicaid coverage for 300,000 children.

But there is more we could have done with the $12 billion the Trump administration has spent on war with Iran. We could have provided housing assistance for around 1 million Americans. We could have lowered prescription drug costs for tens of millions of people. We could have paid the entire National Park Service for more than 3 years. We could have given Pell grants to 1.6 million students so they could afford to go to college. We could have provided retirement and disability pay for veterans wounded in combat and still had plenty of money left over. We could have helped pay the salaries of more than 100,000 teachers and nurses--2 jobs that are crucial, and where we have seen shortages. We could have funded Direct File, the program that lets Americans file their taxes online and for free. We could have funded that for two whole decades. We could have provided humanitarian assistance for countries around the world for almost 3 full years. That is a huge amount of money.

And I want to talk about one more thing we could be spending taxpayer money on instead of Trump's reckless war in Iran: making childcare more affordable for families.

Here is the thing: People have been getting childcare all wrong. Childcare costs are painfully high. Right now, families are having to choose between breaking the budget, being forced to cut back on work hours, or settling for lower quality care just to ensure that their kids have a safe place to be while the parents are working. In 49 of the 50 States, families pay more for childcare for their two kids than they do for rent.

And the reason why costs are so high is that, right now, people think of childcare as a privilege or as a service that is for sale. That is wrong. We should be thinking of universal childcare as basic public infrastructure. We should be thinking about it the same way we think about roads and highways. Why? Because, for this country to work, we need to care for our kids. And when parents don't have childcare, they can't go to work.

Investing in universal childcare is also good for our kids' development, and it is good for our economy. We need affordable childcare just as much as we need schools to educate our workers and bridges to connect goods to the market. It is basic infrastructure to make this country run. It is the infrastructure we need to thrive. And, up until now, our Nation just hasn't been thinking about childcare that way. This is why we need to invest in childcare for every family.

It is just basic supply and demand. There are a whole bunch of families that need childcare, but there are a whole lot fewer childcare workers. Normally, when we want to attract more workers to an area, we just pay them more. But childcare prices are already sky high, and families just can't afford it. So where does that leave us? There is a huge gap that the Federal Government needs to fill.

Imagine: If the Federal Government didn't invest in roads and bridges, we just wouldn't have them.

And that is what is happening with childcare, and it is why we need to invest in universal childcare and raise wages for childcare workers. They should at least make the same amount as local public schoolteachers.

In the wealthiest country on this planet, access to affordable, high- quality childcare and early childhood education should not be a privilege reserved for the rich; it should be a right.

But instead of talking about lowering childcare costs, Donald Trump is delivering a punch to the gut to every parent struggling with those costs. Donald Trump is spending billions of dollars a week bombing Iran for reasons he cannot explain, but he cannot find a nickel to help the millions of people who are struggling to pay for healthcare, groceries, or childcare.

But this is a one-two punch. The Trump administration is spending a tremendous amount of money on war, and the war is also driving up costs for Americans.

Take the price of gasoline over the past month. For months, Donald Trump has been saying gas prices are going down. He has been loud and proud about it. Right now, the average price for gas is more than $3.70 a gallon, more than 80 cents higher per gallon than just 1 month ago, when Donald Trump started this war. That is more than a 25-percent increase in gas prices in a single month, which Donald Trump called a ``very small price to pay''--whoa, spoken like a billionaire.

We have not seen gas prices jump this much since Russia attacked Ukraine.

And now Donald Trump's war is choking off the Strait of Hormuz. That is where about one-fifth of the world's oil and natural gas supply comes through, and right now it is all bottled up.

So what does that mean? Trump's war with Iran means gas prices are skyrocketing for American families here at home. And Donald Trump's response?

If they rise, they rise.

In other words, he just doesn't care.

Here is another one: food prices. About a third of the world's fertilizer goes through that same Strait of Hormuz, and prices jumped up by 30 percent in the days after Trump started this war. One U.S. farmer even said his fertilizer suppliers are warning they just can't get the fertilizer. It is not only that the price has gone up; it just literally is not available.

So you have all this fertilizer that can't go through the Strait of Hormuz, that can't make it to our farmers here in America. And without that fertilizer, the farmers say they just can't plant as much food this year. And what is that going to mean? It means food prices will go up.

So that is gasoline; that is food. But the prices of clothes, of technology, of basically anything that is moved around by trucks that use gasoline or diesel--the prices for all of those goods will go up as well. Diesel prices are already up by more than 25 percent, raising the cost of shipping goods--including Amazon packages and food--nationwide. And jet fuel prices have shot up by 58 percent since Trump started the war. Airlines are passing these costs on to consumers by pushing ticket prices up even higher.

Donald Trump's war with Iran is gearing up to become another forever war that burns billions of taxpayer dollars and makes life even more expensive for Americans here at home. This is a war that the American people do not want and did not ask for, but they are the ones who are footing the bill.

And what does the Trump administration have to say about that? Well, listen to Trump's top economic adviser. He said:

If [the war] were to be extended, it wouldn't really

disrupt the U.S. economy very much at all. It would hurt

consumers, and we'd have to think about . . . what we would

have to do about that. But that's really the last of our

concerns right now.

Consumers, ``the last of our concerns''; higher prices for your family, ``the last of our concerns''--according to the Trump administration.

Look, you don't need to wonder why prices are going up. The Trump administration has said the quiet part out loud. The higher costs American families are paying are the last of the concerns for the Trump administration, and they can't even be bothered to worry about lowering costs for the American people.

Lie No. 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6: Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and other top Trump officials just can't keep their story straight. They have no clear plan and

for weeks have failed to tell the American people what the goals are for this war and when this war will end.

First, Trump said the war would be over in 4 to 5 weeks. OK, that was 3 weeks ago. Since then, Trump has said all of these things: The war is ``won.'' The United States still needs to ``finish the job.'' The operations could end ``soon.'' The military may need to go ``further.''

Every hour, the Trump administration's justification for this war sounds completely different.

Why did the United States strike Iran? On March 2, Pete Hegseth said it was to end a 47-year war. The same day, Hegseth said it is because Iran refused to negotiate. And in another comment on the same day, Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, said it was a response to Israel planning to strike. And then--yep, on the same day--Donald Trump said it had nothing to do with Israel planning to strike. Donald Trump said:

[I]f anything, I might have forced Israel's hand.

Rubio then said Iran would have ``so many short-range missiles'' in a year. That is the reason to initiate the war.

Two days later, Trump says the reason why the United States struck Iran is because he had a ``good feeling'' that Iran would strike U.S. assets and our personnel in the region.

Look, it is just one story after another, and none of them add up. How can the American people trust this government when this government can't even keep its own story straight?

And the Trump administration clearly has no plan for how this war will end. On the very first day of the war, Trump called the attacks ``major combat operations in Iran.'' A week later, Trump called it a ``short-term excursion'' that we are ``getting very close to finishing.''

And what is the goal? The administration has no clue. On day one of the war, Trump told the American people he had to attack Iran because Iran posed an imminent threat based on their nuclear capabilities. But remember, last June, Trump bombed Iran and claimed that Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities had been ``completely and totally obliterated.'' Both of those things cannot be true at the same time.

And understand this: If Trump believes that Iran's nuclear ambitions are a threat, then he had a chance to curb them. In fact, the United States had a deal that could have prevented Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. That was President Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, and Trump ripped up that deal and--here is the best part--got nothing--nothing-- in return.

So instead of doing the hard work of diplomacy to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, Trump lies to the American people while dragging us into yet another reckless war that is costing American lives.

If you can believe it, Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth have even given conflicting takes on whether or not this war is over. On March 8, Hegseth said:

[T]his is only just the beginning.

The next day, March 9, Trump said the war is ``complete, pretty much.'' But he also said: ``You could say both,'' very complete and just the beginning.

Trump also said that we ``haven't won enough'' and that we will ``go further.'' But just days later, he said:

We won. The first hour, it was over.

And then he said:

We don't want to leave early, do we? We've got to finish

the job.

Then, last week, Trump said we are ramping up strikes.

How long will this war go on? Well, one day after the war, Trump said ``4 to 5 weeks.'' The same day, Hegseth said ``more or less than 2, 4, or 6 weeks.'' And then he added:

It could move up. It could move back.

Then Hegseth said:

We'll go as far as we need to go to advance American

interest.

On March 10, Hegseth said it is up to Trump. He said:

Our will is endless. Ultimately, the President gets to

determine the end state of those objectives.

On March 11, Trump said the war with Iran will end ``soon.''

Look, this is not a game. This administration is sending young Americans to die overseas, and that means our government leaders need to treat this conflict with life-and-death seriousness. Instead, they don't even have the decency to level with the American people.

Yet another lie from the Trump administration was about the horrific U.S. military strike on an elementary school in the early days of the war. Last week, a preliminary investigation by the Department of Defense confirmed that it is likely that it was our own military that bombed a girls school in Iran. This was one of the most devastating military mistakes in decades. Mr. President, 175 people were killed; most of them were children.

Now, before the investigation, Trump said over and over that the attack was done by Iran. But even after the investigation, Trump kept lying to the American people. He said he ``didn't know'' about the investigation--an investigation done by his own military on one of the most horrific military mistakes in recent history.

And, remember, Pete Hegseth gutted the office that was in charge of preventing civilian harm. How do I know? I led the charge to establish that office in the first place.

Hegseth is also purging the military's legal experts, the people who act as legal guardrails and ordered a ``ruthless'' overhaul to make sure that no one else who might question him is left standing.

It is a betrayal of our servicemembers and a betrayal of the American people that we still have no answers and no accountability.

So what would accountability look like here? Well, for starters, Pete Hegseth should be fired immediately. Hegseth's long pattern of chaos and incompetence has put our servicemembers and the American people at risk, and we haven't even scratched the surface of Signalgate or Hegseth's role in boat strikes that could be war crimes.

Pete Hegseth has got to go, and he needs to go now.

The basic story here is pretty straightforward. Working families are struggling to pay for basic needs like groceries, housing, healthcare, and electricity. And now, prices are shooting up even higher because of Donald Trump's new war in Iran.

Donald Trump's dangerous actions overseas are making everyday life both more expensive, and regular Americans are paying the price. That is Trump's America in a nutshell. And instead of changing their policies and actually trying to help the American people and not just themselves and their rich buddies, Trump and the Republicans are working to keep as many Americans from voting as humanly possible.

That is what this bill is really about, and every Senator who cares about our democracy should vote no.

I yield the floor.

Thank you, Madam President.

May I be recognized after Senator Merkley, Madam President?

Madam President, I thank the Presiding Officer for the recognition.

I spent last weekend in Grand Junction. I am happy to be here tonight on the floor with my colleague from Colorado John Hickenlooper. I spent last weekend in Grand Junction, in our State, on Colorado's Western Slope. And my conversations with young parents and with families just starting out, I think--I would hope--would be familiar to many colleagues that are here. We discussed the price of housing, which has surged over 80 percent over the last 10 years in Colorado; the price of healthcare, which is ratcheting higher and becoming impossible for families to afford, not just in Colorado but all across our country; the cost of childcare, which is making it harder for families to live any semblance of a middle-class life--families that are working two jobs just to pay the mortgage can't even afford childcare when they are working with those two salaries--and our inability as a nation, as a State, to prepare our kids for the dynamic and potentially hugely unforgiving economy they are about to enter. This is a tough economy that we are in today, and tariffs and now gas prices haven't helped.

Last week, colleagues, I met with a food bank from El Paso County, who told me that they stay open late--listen to this, U.S. Senate. This food bank in El Paso County said that they stay open late 1 day a week to have teachers' night so the teachers that have worked all week teaching children have the opportunity to come to that food bank in the evening to get food to feed their own children at home.

I doubt very much that there is a living American who can remember a decade in this country when we took it for granted that teachers would have to go to a food bank to feed their own children.

Can you imagine, in the 1950s, in this Chamber, if it were known that people teaching in America--in inner-city America or in the suburbs of our great cities--that the pay wasn't satisfactory, so they had to go to a food bank after work?

And that is happening to working people all over our country, people that are in what we think of as traditional middle-class lives, because of how savage this economy has been, because of the affordability crisis that, I will say, has been with us for decades in this country but the current administration, the Trump administration, has made far worse and now is making it even worse with what they are doing to energy prices because of their unauthorized war in the Middle East.

I wish we were working on that affordability crisis today. I wish we were working on building an economy that worked for everybody, not just the people at the very top.

This is a choice that is being made by President Trump and the majority in this Senate, the Republicans, who have spent the entire week fighting for a bill that will make it harder for family members and for aging parents and for their cousins to vote or to register to vote. That is what they have chosen to use the floor of the U.S. Senate to do. It is shameful. It is shameful both because it is ignoring the affordability crisis that our families are facing, but it is shameful because there is no excuse for taking away the right to vote from people all over the United States of America.

These are people who are supposed to believe in States' rights, believe in the ability of States to be able to run their own affairs. And Donald Trump--President Trump--and the Republican's SAVE America Act rewrites the way we run elections in America completely. It rips up the processes all over the United States of America at the local level that county clerks and election officials understand. It requires the Federal Government to have access to the voter rolls, a shocking thing from the party that is supposed to be about States' rights.

And it creates yet another unfunded mandate for States and for local communities. There is no money in here to fund the stuff that is in this bill.

Most troublingly, it imposes new document requirements for voter registration that many Americans do not have or do not have access to. Madam President, 146 million Americans don't have a passport. Almost 70 million women do not have a birth certificate that matches their real name. That should be self-evident to anybody in this Chamber, but it is ignored completely by the people who wrote this legislation.

Over 8 million Americans have moved to a different State within the last year, and an average of over 17 million will have moved counties. Many of them--probably most--do not have the paperwork that this bill requires. That doesn't make any sense. These people aren't trying to evade the law. These people are availing themselves of their right as an American citizen to move from place to place in this Nation.

This radical legislation actually requires people to register in- person, banning common methods, as we heard from the Senator from Alaska who is standing up for her State as she always does.

We should be supporting her. We should be supporting Alaska's way of running their elections rather than imposing Donald Trump's corrupt way of running his elections.

This radical legislation actually requires people to register in- person, banning common methods of registration--online registration, through the mail, or automatically at the DMV.

That is how 94 percent of Americans register to vote. Many of them are seniors. Many of them live in rural communities. I would like to see the majority party in this Chamber come to western Colorado and try to take--rather than having this fake filibuster--try to actually take mail-in ballots from the people of western Colorado.

I would like to see that. They would avail themselves of any means necessary to prevent that from happening.

The SAVE America Act would set our voter registration process back decades. If you are one of the more than 60 million Americans who live in rural areas, you might now need to drive hundreds of miles to stand in line at a local election agency.

If you live overseas, you will have to fly back. If you don't have a passport, you better have your birth certificate. If you don't have your birth certificate or you changed your name like tens of millions of married women across this country living in the 21st century, you will have to provide additional documents and sign affidavits.

All of this will--

I will not yield. I will not yield. I have waited an hour--

You will have your time.

Thank you, Madam President. Thank you, Madam President.

Madam President, I will yield for the one inaccuracy you think that I have--

Well, then you will have to wait. Then you will have to wait. Then you will have to wait.

Madam President, I haven't yielded the floor.

I didn't. I said I would yield for one inaccuracy. That is all I said.

I am not willing to hear it. I am not willing to hear it. I will hear it after--

I don't believe I did yield.

If I did yield--

I will exercise my right to withdraw.

Madam President, all of this will have to be done in-person. Kansas tried to implement its own State-level version of President Trump's SAVE America Act in 2013 with disastrous results.

This law, which included citizenship documentation requirements, ended up blocking the voter registration of more than 31,000 U.S. citizens who are otherwise eligible to vote. That represented about 12 percent of all Kansas voter registrations during that period.

Even Kansas Republican secretary of state who championed the bill when he was a State legislator has warned against the bill now before us. He has warned against the bill now before us saying: It didn't work out so well.

And Kansas law was blocked by a Federal court, as it should have been.

If we pass this bill, we will have now two different election--Madam President, can I have the floor without the interruption of my colleague from Utah?

If you guys are done, I would like to--Madam President, I would like--

Madam President, if we pass this bill, we will now have two different election regimes in this country--one for Federal elections and one for local elections. That is insane in and of itself and begs the question: Why does Donald Trump want to pass this bill?

He wants to run roughshod over our election system because he claims there is an epidemic of voter fraud caused by undocumented people voting. That is at the heart of his claim, and that has been the heart of his claim throughout two Presidential elections and this Presidency.

The problem is that he is blowing up our elections, and there is no evidence to support his claim of fraud. The fact is that even his own Department of Homeland Security used by many States to verify voter citizenship returned .04 percent of voter participants as noncitizens.

A bipartisan policy center analysis of the Heritage Foundation's debate of noncitizen voting found only 77 cases in 25 years of nearly 2 billion votes cast.

And individual States tell us the same. We heard it earlier tonight. Last year, Utah performed a citizen review of its entire voter registration list. There was no noncompliance. After an assessment of more than 2 million registered voters, Utah identified only 1 confirmed instance of noncitizen registration and no instances of noncitizen voting.

We definitely have a crisis in our democracy and in our economy and they are related. Over the decades, we have suffered through an economy that has reduced economic mobility and hollowed out America's middle class.

At the same time, we have built a tax system that disproportionately benefits those who own assets and perpetuates the inequalities that accumulated with generational wealth, a tax system that allows Donald Trump and Elon Musk to pass their stock portfolios onto their heirs without paying a dollar on the gains that they have accrued.

That is a crisis. The lack of economic mobility is a crisis, and I am sorry to say that that tax regime, that has been done in a bipartisan manner. Republicans definitely more than Democrats have pursued trickle-down economics, but Democrats and Republicans both played a role creating an unfair system that reinforces our desperate lack of economic mobility and concretizes our deep and growing economic inequality.

At the same time, this body has failed to make important investment in our infrastructure while saddling future generations with ever- greater amounts of debt, debt whose service costs will now predictably take up $1 trillion of our annual budget in interest--more than we spend on Medicare or defense, a higher share of the economy than at any point in American history.

We are in a dangerous moment at home and abroad. There is no doubt about that. And at the same time as Coloradans and Americans across the country are struggling to get by, as teachers are going to those food banks to feed their own children, when confidence in our institutions and in our politics is at record lows, and we have a campaign finance system that gives inordinate power to the wealthiest.

Tonight is not the night to go through how wrongly decided Citizens United was, how wrongly decided, how ignorant that decision was of the way politics actually works in this country.

But let me just point out to you that in 2008, before Citizens United was decided, the top 100 individual donors contributed a combined $80 million--$80 million in 2008. That is what the 100 donors contributed.

In 2024, the top 10 donors--the top 10 donors--contributed over $1.2 billion. Spending by outside groups has exploded from a total of $574 million in 2008 to almost $4.5 billion in that last election, an increase of 8 times--8 times.

No one could possibly believe that the amount of money--that that amount of money is helping our democracy. Let me tell you something: Does the SAVE Act do anything about that corrosiveness in our politics? Of course not. Of course not.

And let me tell you something that was a fatal flaw in the Supreme Court's decision while I am here. Maybe the pages, when they are Senators, will be able to fix this problem because we sure aren't going fix it.

At the end of that--at the end of their decision, they said: By the way, if the Congress ever passes a constitutional regulation of--in their words--constitutional regulation of the outside spending in our political system, we will, of course, have to give that the proper analysis, the proper--excuse me--the required constitutional analysis.

Of course, nobody will ever pass that around here because the billionaires that are writing checks to these elections just have to rattle the pennies in their pockets and the change in their pockets and threaten to run a primary against anybody in this place, and the bill won't be brought.

And then there is a profound corruption of inaction that sets in as a result to our legislative branch both here and in the House of Representatives.

Does the SAVE America Act address any of this? Of course not. Instead, Donald Trump and the Republicans have brought to the floor a bill to make it harder for ordinary American citizens to register and to vote.

Fundamentally, the SAVE America Act is an astonishing Federal overreach in search of a scandal that doesn't exist and would have the effect of undermining fraud-free elections like we have in Colorado.

Colorado was the first State in America to complete a risk-limiting audit, the gold standard for verifying the integrity of election results.

It entails counting and comparing a representative sample of ballots to the reported result. To prevent hacking, none of our voting machines are connected to the internet. We require county clerks to use two- factor authentication to access voter databases.

Once a vote is cast, a bipartisan team of election judges in each county

checks every signature against the copy in the database for any discrepancies. All election officials and judges with access to the tabulation process must first pass a Colorado Bureau of Investigation background check. And Colorado has spent years--years--implementing top-tier cyber security measures and audits to prevent hackers from interfering in our electoral process.

We should be modeling our Federal system off the gold standard framework we have in Colorado, a national leader in terms of voter access, election security, and might I say, voter turnout.

Instead, the SAVE America Act would eliminate--eliminate, outlaw-- many of the practices that Colorado has adopted to keep our elections safe and increase voter confidence.

How dare you?

It would end Colorado's mail-in and online voter registration system. It would force Colorado to increase the security risks of our voter data and routinely purge voter rolls. It would push experienced county clerks and election workers out of the field. It would remove the possibility of using a number of State IDs when going to vote. It would create two tiers of voting for Federal and State elections and possibly upend our mail-in ballot system itself by requiring that every Coloradan proactively request a ballot and resubmit proof of ID alongside their ballot request in every election.

Colorado already has ID requirements when casting a ballot. We already have among the cleanest voter rolls in this country. We don't need Donald Trump to corrupt our process. Even the Heritage Foundation ranked us as second in the Nation in 2020 for clean lists--the Heritage Foundation.

We have one of the most secure election systems of any State in our country, and because Coloradans have trust in our elections, we have some of the highest voter turnouts in the country.

But the SAVE America Act--the so-called SAVE America Act--does not bring our system anywhere close to what we enjoy in Colorado. Instead it turns into a dark but familiar pattern in American history.

And I am sorry to say, but this bill before us is just another in a long line of legislative efforts to limit the franchise in this country, to add new restrictions and additional obstacles.

Nobody wants voter fraud. I do not want voter fraud. I come from a State where there is no voter fraud. We set the gold standard, in part because of the work my colleague John Hickenlooper did when he was Governor of Colorado.

This is a pretext. This is a pretext to invade our elections.

I know my colleague from Texas wants to speak. So I am trying to skip ahead here.

We have had a fight over many, many, many years in this Nation to broaden the franchise, from the very beginning, and that fight was won by men and women who marched to demand that their vote count equally in this country, no matter what color they were, no matter where they lived in our Nation, no matter what education or religion their parents had or whether their parents were immigrants to this country.

In this modern era, when one of the real fundamental risks to our democracy is the American people's loss of confidence in our institutions, including our voting process and elections themselves, we now have a group of people who are trying to create political advantage for themselves by restricting the vote in the name of addressing a mythical voter fraud that does not exist.

The American people will not be fooled by this. They will be angry about this, as they should. The American people have come to rely on vote-by-mail, and registration by mail, and early voting. They believe our system is fraud free, and where it is not, the State should address it.

Our citizens have come to rely on having the franchise extended through modern technology and modern practices. Nobody I know in Colorado has said they doubt the validity or veracity of our voting system--no matter what party they are in or whether they live in rural Colorado or urban Colorado--or the importance of the ability to register online, or for students and others to have the benefit of same-day registration.

I wish everybody in this country had the benefit of that. Those are ways of encouraging participation in our democracy. None of us want fraud.

None of us want fraud. And there is no fraud. The good news is there is certainly no evidence in Colorado or across the country that that fraud exists.

And this is the most sweeping effort, make no mistake, by Donald Trump, by the Republicans here in the Senate, to ``nationalize our elections,'' to undermine voter confidence, and inject new chaos into a system he is terrified will turn against him; to make life harder for Americans that he thinks voted against him, and probably will make it harder for the people who voted for him.

Since the President's return to office, he has focused relentlessly on false narratives of voter fraud. He has issued Executive orders that are unenforceable. He has sued States that have refused to comply and threatened to take control of the electoral process in States he views as political enemies.

He has sent Federal agents from the FBI and the Director of National Intelligence to seize ballots in Georgia, election records in Arizona, and voting machines in Puerto Rico.

His Justice Department has sued 30 States, including Colorado, demanding sensitive, unredacted voter data to create a national voter database. And President Trump has pursued a longstanding and inexplicable grievance against mail-in voting, which he falsely claims can be used to commit mass amounts of fraud. It is simply not true. It is simply not true.

He sees it, in his own words--the SAVE America Act--as a method to ``guarantee the midterms'' this November. He sees, in his own words, the SAVE America Act as a method to ``guarantee the midterms'' this November. And that is why they put this on this floor now? I hope not. I really hope not.

This is an election bill that distorts our shared understanding of what free and fair elections should look like, and Coloradans want no part of it.

This legislation, by the way, is wildly unpopular in America. We have received thousands of calls and letters in opposition to the SAVE America Act. We received over 7,000 last month alone.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that these constituent letters be printed in the Record.

The Founders understood the gravity of the debate before them about who could and who could not claim the franchise. The authors of Federalist No. 52 explain that ``the definition of the right of suffrage is very justly regarded as a fundamental article of republican government.''

They wrestled with this question. They wrestled with this question. They debated it. And, ultimately, they excluded the great number of subjects who were newly made Americans, but, nevertheless, were denied, as those at Seneca Falls wrote, ``the first right of citizen.''

This was the founding generation's great mistake--this and the enslavement of Americans. And we have spent centuries working to rectify it--centuries working to rectify it.

Should the SAVE America Act pass, we will fall further away from realizing this country's promise and retread the familiar errors of the past. We should reject that vision of our democracy. We should reject that return to a history that we have fought so hard to free ourselves from. Coloradans and all Americans deserve better than this.

I yield the floor and look forward to hearing my colleague from Texas.

Mr. President, you are entitled to your opinion. This is a free country. Whether you like President Trump or not is up to you. Your view of the war is up to you. But you are not entitled to your facts. You are entitled to the facts. And here are the facts. To my Democratic colleagues, I challenge you today to prove that I am wrong.

During the negotiations to find a peaceful solution to the Iranian nuclear problem, President Trump sent Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to negotiate with the Iranians. They say all they want is peaceful nuclear power--the Iranians. They have been saying that--and they should be entitled to enrich like other countries, like us, a bunch of nations--enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, and they claim: Why not us? Because you cheat.

The IAEA--not me, not Lindsey Graham--you have had a history of not living up to what you say about your ambitions, that your enrichment facilities are not designed to produce peaceful power, but a weapon.

So during the negotiations, Witkoff and Kushner offered the Iranians: Listen, if you will give us your highly enriched uranium, we will guarantee you a lifetime fuel supply for free, that you can have all the spent fuel you need to operate a peaceful power program you don't need to enrich, and if you want to enrich for medical purposes, very limited, fine, but you can't have an enrichment program that would lead to making bomb-grade material because you are not reliable.

And I would go a step further. It would be like letting Hitler have anything. See, the difference between me and, I think, a lot of people here--maybe most of my Democratic colleagues--I think these guys are religious Nazis. Hitler wanted a master race. He wrote a book. Nobody believed him. He literally wanted to kill all the Jews, and nobody believed him. The Ayatollah is the same. The regime is built around the cult of death. They want three things to purify Islam. They are Shiites. Their No. 1 enemy is Sunni Arabs. They think they have got the faith wrong--that they are traitors to the faith. They hate Sunnis because they are not true to the faith, and Saudi Arabia believes it.

So they want to purify Islam, bend it to their will, make every Sunni reject their view of Islam and accept the Ayatollah's view. That is what they say, not me. I believe them.

No. 2, they want to kill all the Jews, and they openly say it. They are not hiding their disdain for Israel. They actually talk about it. They put ``Death to Israel'' on, like, milk cartons. These people are serious, and we should take them seriously.

Like in the thirties, people didn't want to believe that Hitler meant what he said because they were tired from World War I, and they said: Oh, he is just all talk. He wants this. He wants that. He wants more German-speaking territory. He is not completely crazy. You know, he is sort of just doing the Hitler thing.

Well, he was completely crazy. Now, I don't know why he wanted to kill all the Jews. I don't know why Hitler thought the Aryan race is the only pure race on the planet, but a lot of people are dead because we got that wrong. Let's don't do that again.

We are playing like World War II never actually happened, and you are rewriting this regime's history. From 1979, what have they done until today to make you think they don't believe what they say? What behavior have they exhibited that they really do want to be normal?

So during those negotiations when they said no to every offer under the Sun, they said something that was a fatal mistake for them: Oh, by the way, we have 460 kilograms of uranium at 60 percent. Now, why did they tell us that? They were trying to intimidate us and letting us know that if we don't bend to their will, we will have a problem.

Now, what is the problem? The difference between 60 and 90 percent enrichment is weeks, not months or years. And when you get to 90, that is weapons-grade enrichment. That material can be turned into a nuclear weapon. Mr. President, 460 kilograms at 90 percent is enough to build 10 nuclear bombs. And I am talking weeks, not months, to go from 60 to 90, and they were threatening to do it.

What did President Trump do? Instead of begging them not to, instead of giving them a bunch of money bribing them not to, he blew up their enrichment facilities so they couldn't

get to 90 percent. It is called Midnight Hammer. Mr. President, I am glad you did, and it is clear to me nobody in the Democratic Party would have done that.

The question for my friends on the other side and critics within my own party: How could they have 60 percent enriched uranium at 460 kilograms without cheating? Everything you wanted to do to contain these people failed. The JCPOA--every agreement that has been offered to restrict Iran's nuclear program failed if, in fact, they do have 460 kilograms of uranium at 60 percent.

So here is my challenge: If you don't believe that is true, come to the floor and tell me why I am wrong. We know that the material at 60 percent is under all the rubble of their enrichment facilities, and we are worried that somehow somebody is going to get it before we do.

It is a fact that they had produced enough uranium at 60 percent. That means they were cheating because there is no commercial purpose for uranium to be enriched at 60 percent--none--zero. You don't need that to run a nuclear power program. You need nothing beyond 20. To go to 60 means you are a threshold nuclear nation. Why 60? It is just a small jump to 90, and they want to intimidate and blackmail the world.

When they told us that: We have got this much at 60, Trump said: Well, that is all you are going to do because I am going to take enrichment off the table. And thank God he did.

Their enrichment program has been obliterated, and they couldn't go to 90. I think they will come back at it one day if we don't deal with it now. So that is Midnight Hammer.

Epic Fury. What happened after we blew up the enrichment facilities? Within weeks, they were actually, the Iranians, trying to start over again, going deeper. What was the lesson they learned from Midnight Hammer? We are not deep enough in the ground.

And here is the most telling thing: They were trying to create a new enrichment capability that did not require an air shaft. Now, why is that important? The bombs that were used that were dropped on the enrichment facilities went through the air shaft--penetrated and blew up the facilities deep underground. That is a testament to our air power, that the air shaft opening was about the size of a refrigerator, and we dropped bombs through those air shafts to obliterate the enrichment facilities they had.

Instead of learning their lesson and ``let's sit down and talk about peaceful nuclear power,'' they went the other way. I think that is a fact.

So Epic Fury. If you do not see this is an imminent threat, then you are blind for your hatred of Trump. There are people on the left and people in my own party that are more afraid of Trump being successful than the Ayatollah having nuclear weapons. That is sick. That is sick.

When Obama took out bin Laden, I clapped like a seal. Every time he wanted to go into Syria, I was there with him and John McCain. I have tried to be bipartisan on such things. I never have ever introduced a resolution against a Democratic President under the congressional War Powers Act to limit their ability to protect the Nation ever because I think it is unconstitutional. I have never done to a Democrat what you constantly are doing to this Republican President. And when a Republican tried to do that, I objected.

If you don't like what President Trump or any other President is doing in military matters, cut off the funding. We have the power of the purse. We could stop funding for these operations, and that would be constitutional. What we can't do, in my view, is become the Commander in Chief.

You can't have 535 people becoming the Commander in Chief, and that is what the War Powers Act does. After 60 days, if Congress doesn't approve, military action stops. Basically, under the Constitution, you can be Commander in Chief for only 60 days and Congress takes over. That is not what they had in mind.

Let me tell you what the Founders had in mind: a single person--the President--to be Commander in Chief and Congress to have the power of the purse and regulate the land and naval forces. That is the balance we have had all these years, and the War Powers Act is unconstitutional because it destroys that balance.

But it doesn't mean Congress is out of the game. Literally, if you had a resolution or an appropriation bill denying funding for Epic Fury, I wouldn't agree with you, but you would be on sound constitutional grounds.

Now, why do I oppose this? Not just because I think it is an infringement on the power of the President and an overstep by the Congress. I think it would be really, quite frankly, dangerous not to finish this thing out.

In 18 or 19 days, we have done a number on the ability of Iran to build ballistic missiles to hit us and our allies. And if you don't think they would, put yourself in the same category that miscalculated Hitler. What is it about the Iranians that you think they really don't mean what they say?

So we have destroyed that ability to build those missiles to come after us, and they were building 100 a month before we did this.

The second thing is, they have been funding Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, proxies. Hezbollah has a lot of American blood on its hands. It killed 220 marines and sailors back in the 1980s when we were in Lebanon trying to help with that civil war. They attacked our barracks. They have a lot of American blood on their hands from Afghanistan, IEDs made in Iran. So these people have been at war with us since 1979. Finally, we are pushing back.

Instead of doing deals that don't work, we are trying to eliminate the threat in a responsible way.

What happens next in Iran? I think the people will have a chance down the road to decide that--not me, not you. We are not going to invade Iran. We are not going to do the Iraq-Afghanistan thing. There is no reason to. What we want to do militarily is eliminate the threats: They can't fund proxies, they can't build nuclear weapons anymore, and they can't build missiles that would terrorize us in the region and Europe.

When we accomplish those three things, here is what I think will happen: We will build on what President Biden started, which is normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Now, why is that big?

Senator Booker has been great on this. He has gone with me when Biden was President. I was a Republican trying to build on the Abraham Accords, see if we could get Saudi and Israel to normalize, which would be the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It would be the biggest change in thousands of years. And I would be willing to help President Biden-- I was. And we had a bipartisan team. I was part of it.

Well, October 7 came along to stop that. Now, we were very close to having a breakthrough on normalization under President Biden, Tony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Brett McGurk. I went over there eight times, I think. We were close, but October 7 was designed to stop what we were trying to do.

It was a nightmare for the Iranians, I think, for the Arabs and the Israelis to make peace because it changes the region forever, leaving them behind. So October 7 was an attack by Hamas, but it couldn't happen without Iran stopping normalization. And it has worked to a great extent.

The tolerance for a two-state solution in Israel is pretty low after October 7, and the Arab world is pretty inflamed because of Gaza. But we can't let Iran win the day.

So here is what I hope we can do: keep this military campaign going-- weeks, not months; continue to degrade the ability of the IRGC to terrorize their own people, to wreak havoc in the region. And we are going to take some blows. They still have a lot of drones, they still have missiles, but less every day.

Gas price is up--no small thing for somebody trying to raise a family on a limited income. But I believe with all my heart that you pay now or you pay later with this regime.

We were a couple of weeks away from the Ayatollah and his crowd having weapons-grade material for 10 bombs. You think things are bad now? I can only imagine what the world would look like if this madman and his regime actually had nuclear weapons. One, I think he would use it. If you don't believe he would kill all the Jews, that would be a mistake. Certainly the Jewish people believe that.

This idea that we were drug into the war by Israel--that is the oldest game, literally, in the book: If it weren't for the Jews, we would all be better off. It is the Jews that are always getting us in trouble.

What an offensive thing to say. Israel consulted with us. We do have common values, and we have a common enemy. They don't just chant ``Death to Israel''; they chant ``Death to America,'' the Iranian regime, and they have our blood on their hands, not just Israeli blood.

So the idea that somehow President Trump got hoodwinked by the Jews is like--enough already. If you know anything about President Trump, nothing could be further from the truth, and you are just giving life to the idea that has been around for like 2,000 years for the Jewish people. Enough.

So what I hope will happen: We will be steady. For the American people, there is going to be some pain.

The region: You are going to get hit again. We have lost soldiers. God bless them. God bless the wounded--a couple hundred. And casualties may increase.

But the only thing I can tell you about the military from my time being around it, which is most of my adult life: The worst thing you can do to a military unit is ask them to sacrifice and not finish the job. Do you want to help the military? Let them finish the job they believe in, that is necessary. And you get nothing for finishing second in a war with mad people, crazy people.

If you don't think the regime is built around a cult of death, then you missed a lot. They want a religious world that they run. They want a religious master race, not an Aryan-ethic master race. They want to dominate the world through their faith, and that should scare you.

I don't intend to bend to their will. I don't think Sunni Arabs are. You know what. Most Iranians don't buy that, but they have been killed by the tens of thousands. They have had it too.

So I think we are close to weakening the regime to the point that we can start again with normalization talks between Saudi and Israel, which would be the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict--the biggest change in 2,000 years. If they can't do another October 7, then I think we may get there, building on what was done by the past administration.

So just think about it. We are not going to get a normalization deal that doesn't have a Palestinian component because MBS, the leader of Saudi Arabia, can't recognize Israel until he finds some dignified solution for the Palestinians that Israel can live with. And he wants a defense agreement with us because he wants to come our way--not Turkiye, not Pakistan. A mutual defense agreement.

Well, to my Democratic friends: Entertain the idea of helping us get there, but you should insist that there is something there for the Palestinians. And we all have a chance here to make history.

In a few more weeks, not a few more months, we should be at the point, in my view, that we can start where we ended before, and Iran's efforts to deny real peace to the region will have failed.

Kharg Island. Seldom in the history of warfare has a country or a warring opponent had a single point of failure. All their money comes from oil and gas in Iran--the regime--and all the infrastructure virtually is on a single island. If you control that island, you control the destiny of the income to continue this war.

And remember what I said: I don't know what President Trump is going to do.

As to this resolution, I have a lot of admiration for Senator Booker. We are going to be friends, and we will work together where we can. I think this is the wrong signal at the wrong time. I never believed it was constitutional. I never did it with a Democratic President.

But we do not need to do this because if we stop now, then we are going to pay a heavy price later. The worst possible outcome is for those 32,000 people to go to the streets and die for nothing. The worst possible outcome is to suffer and not get it right. They have a pair of 2's, and we have a full house. It is not a card game, but we are in a good spot.

To those who have lost their lives and been injured: You died in the service of your country, making the world safer, and that is what military people sign up for.

To those who have been injured: You have been hurt trying to stop something that matters.

This is not a foolish endeavor. This is something that had to be done because they were going to break out if we didn't stop them. We were really a couple of weeks away from them having enough uranium at 90 percent to make 10 bombs, and the world would have changed in the blink of an eye.

So I am going to oppose this resolution. I am going to support President Trump's plan to continue to defang the regime. And I will join with my Democratic colleagues if they would like, and if Saudi Arabia and Israel want to talk about changing the Mideast forever, I would encourage you to do what I did. Let's all work together to bring about the biggest change in 2,000 years.

The reason we didn't get there in the last administration was because of October 7. It wasn't any fault of anybody else. This attack was designed to stop everything we tried before. And it would be a shame and a tremendous missed opportunity in history to let the Iranians deny the region something I think they really want: to move forward, not backward.

I will end with this. To the American people: I know it is tough. I know the economy, on the gas front, is hurting. But I do believe this with every ounce of my being: If we had not done this, they would be on the path, the Iranian regime, to a nuclear capability, and they would use it. Eventually, they would use it or give it to somebody who would. They are no different than Hitler except this: Hitler wanted a master race to run this world, and he was denied--only after about 50 million people died. This regime wants a master religion to dominate this world. I don't know why, but I believe them. And we are so close to getting this right.

Since 1979, this regime has been built around a cult of death. A 16- year-old girl was killed last year for not having the headscarf on right--drug off the bus and beaten to death. The people have been in the streets, slaughtered by the tens of thousands.

Let's not let this moment pass. Let's, in a responsible way, keep weakening this regime, giving the people down the road a chance to have a new Iran, stand with our allies, finish the job. And if you do it right, a gateway to peace will open up.

The biggest thing you can say to those who sacrificed or were hurt and died: Because of what you did, you created an avenue for peace that is going to change the world.

So I will be voting no, but I am going to do more than vote no; I am going to support an outcome that will change the world. The day this regime no longer can wreak terror and havoc will be a good day, and we are close to that. The day when we can get back to the peace table between Saudi Arabia and Israel will be a wonderful day.

The center of Islam, Senator Booker, is Saudi Arabia. That is where the holy mosques of Mecca and Medina are. And this young man, MBS, has made a decision to go a different way. Now, I have had my problems with him, but I really do think he has made a decision to go a different way that will benefit the region and the world.

I hope the Israeli people understand: If you want true peace, lasting peace, you have to deal with your neighbors.

The Abraham Accords tells me they are willing to deal with their neighbors.

Let's don't let October 7 be the final chapter. Let's make sure we punch through what happened on October 7 and we punch through right now to get the conflict in a spot where we can truly have peace.

Last thought: You will never have peace in the Mideast and we will never know peace here at home until this madman regime, the Ayatollah and his henchmen, organized around a cult of death, can no longer hurt us.

I yield the floor.