Mr. President, I usually don't give such lengthy speeches, but today I will be on the floor for a little while, and I have 12 sections to my speech. The first section is on voting rights, of course. The first section is history, equality,…
Mr. President, I usually don't give such lengthy speeches, but today I will be on the floor for a little while, and I have 12 sections to my speech. The first section is on voting rights, of course.
The first section is history, equality, democracy, and the Founders' vision. And I begin with a quote.
To understand political power right, and derive it from its
original, we must consider, what state all men [and women]
are naturally in and that is a state of perfect freedom to
order their actions and dispose of their possessions and
persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of
nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of
any other [person].
John Locke published those words in England anonymously-- anonymously--exactly 100 years before the Constitution of the United States came into effect a very, very long time ago, at least to the human mind.
They were published not in the era of Republics but of kingdoms; not of Presidents but of Monarchs; not of citizens but rather subjects. It was an era when many argued and took up arms for the idea that the King derived power from the decrees of Heaven, and here John Locke said, no, political power, in fact, comes from free individuals.
These words were circulated for years in secret--in secret--because to hold these views back then was treason. Locke went further:
The natural state is also one of equality in which all
power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, and no one has more
than another. It is evident that all human beings . . . are
equal amongst themselves.
These words, these ideas, a third of a millennia old, but it is right there staring us in the face. All men and women are naturally free, and all men and women are naturally equal.
I will admit this may be lofty stuff, but history lessons matter-- because these ideas were the initial blueprints for a different sort of political order that would take shape here in this continent, articulated a century later in the words of the American Declaration of Independence.
These were the original ideas for what would inspire the Framers to create--not a kingdom but a Republic, a democratic society, a place where people equal in rank decide their own leaders and create free elections.
It reminds me of the words of James Madison as well:
Who are to be the electors of the federal representatives?
Not the rich, more than the poor; not the learned, more than
the ignorant; not the haughty heirs of distinguished names. .
. . The electors are to be the great body of the people of
the United States.
Section 2: American History is a Long March Toward Universal Suffrage. That is the noble side of our early history, worthy of remembering and pursuing to this day. There is, of course, a more complicated, more frustrating reality, one we should not be afraid to admit and to recognize. And one we hide from or, worse, try to erase at our own peril.
We all know that when our country was founded, mass participation in representative government might have been the object of the Founders, but it certainly was not a practice. Immediately excluded were 700,000 enslaved men and women, counted as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of congressional allotment, but zero-fifths of a person for all other matters of human dignity. Women, too, were left out.
Also cast aside and brutalized were those who lived on this continent for thousands of years before the colonial era, for whom full participation in political life, in practicality, has never, never been made real, even till today. And through it all--through it all--voting requirements were left to the States to choose for themselves so that depending on which side of a State boundary you lived on, a different side or set of rules might apply to you in determining your worthiness to choose your own leaders.
So despite Madison's sentiments, at the time of our Constitution's ratification, you had to be a White male, oftentimes Protestant, landowner to vote.
By the election of 1800, barely more than 1 in 10 Americans were even eligible to vote. Of the 16 States then in the Union all but 3 limited suffrage to property holders or taxpayers.
And here is another truth too: Despite all that, the story of democracy
in America has been a long march, a very long, torturous march toward universal suffrage.
In America, our holy struggle has been to take these words of our Framers, to take the idea that everyone should live freely and equally and to make it real in whatever way the people can make it real.
It is an exercise in making better what was once woefully imperfect, of having hope that we can make even more progress in the future. Indeed, this is written into the very, very first statement of our Constitution, making a more perfect Union.
So, from the get-go, generations of Americans have sought to truly establish the United States as a full democracy. We fought a bloody Civil War to end slavery. Women organized and reached for the ballot.
The civil rights movement brought an end to the vicious segregation of the mid-20th century. And here in Congress, yes, in this Congress, we passed the Voting Rights Act, the National Voter Registration Act, and the 14th, 15th, 19th, 23rd, 24th, and 26th Amendments to expand the franchise until there were no more boundaries.
Now, we all know, unfortunately, the march has not always been linear. Throughout our Nation's history, moments of significant progress have been followed by reactionary backlash. That backlash takes many forms: White supremacy, tyranny, demagoguery, fear, and political violence, and much, much more.
Today, it lives on in the internet, in the dark corners of online places that deal not in truth but in conspiracies that I would call wacky or bizarre, if they weren't so darn dangerous. It also lives, sadly, in the cascade of deranged propaganda we see emanating from certain cable news networks.
Unfortunately, it seems, led by one party, compelled by the most dishonest President in history, we are entering another one of those dark periods.
That is what we are talking about here today on the Senate floor.
Section 3: The Origins of the Big Lie. If there is anything else, besides free and fair elections, that has been central to our national political character, it has been our largely unbroken fidelity to the peaceful transfer of power--peaceful transfer of power.
You can't talk about voting rights and free and fair elections and democracy without also presupposing that the leaders are willing to step down when their turns are over, when they have lost elections. Thankfully, our leaders have, by and large, honored this tradition, whether that has been in victory or in defeat. Nobody likes losing, but sometimes you have to move on. That is life.
But then came Donald Trump. Like many before him, Trump ran for reelection in 2020 and lost his race. In fact, he lost to Joe Biden by 7 million votes and 74 electoral college votes. I shouldn't have to say that, but it is the truth, and sometimes the truth gets distorted around here.
But rather than accept defeat, rather than follow in the noble tradition of those who came before him, Donald Trump rejected the results of the 2020 election and claimed, without a shred of evidence, without any evidence, that the election was rigged, that it was stolen, that it was a con job unlike anything we have ever seen before.
He planted the seeds of that lie long before the election even happened. Yes, the Big Lie was born then.
Section 4: The Big Lie is Just That, a Lie. It is a lie. It is not a misinterpretation. It is not one person looks at it one way; one person looks at it the other, as my colleagues on the other side of the aisle want us to believe. It is just a lie.
To this day, there is not a shred of evidence supporting the fantasy that Donald Trump won the election only to have it stolen from him.
As a general principle, extraordinary claims should come with extraordinary proof. We haven't seen anything close to proof in the 14 or so months since the 2020 election. On the other side of the aisle, the biggest--biggest--loudest talkers about the election being stolen have not presented any facts. It is appalling.
So let's examine the record. First, Donald Trump has had plenty of chances to prove his allegations in the court of law. In virtually every instance, he has failed. Let me read an excerpt from USA TODAY, published last year on the day of the insurrection:
The President and his allies have filed 62 lawsuits in
state and federal courts seeking to overturn election results
in states that the President lost.
A little further it reads:
Out of the 62 lawsuits filed challenging the presidential
election, 61 have failed.
Sixty-one.
Sixty-two lawsuits in a little under 2 months, and if that is not good enough for some people, let me read further from the article.
Some cases were dismissed--
Says the article--
for lack of standing and others based on the merits of the
voter fraud allegations. The decisions have come from both
Democratic- . . . and Republican-appointed judges--including
federal judges appointed by [President] Trump.
So Trump and his allies went to court to try and make the case for voter fraud and virtually lost at every turn.
Now let us move from the courts to what actually happened in the States during the 2020 election.
Across the board, state officials in States, both red and blue--and, in fact, States that ultimately made the difference in the election-- all said the same thing: There was no--no--voter fraud.
Here is what the Republican Secretary of State in Nevada said in April of last year, the State GOP concerns did ``not amount to evidentiary support for the contention that the 2020 general election was plagued by widespread voter fraud.''
No voter fraud in Nevada.
In Arizona, Secretary of State Hobbs said last year:
There is absolutely no merit to any claims of widespread
voter fraud.
Just this week--just this week--the election department at Maricopa County, the largest county in Arizona, headed by a Republican, released a 90-page document delivering a point-by-point refusal of claims of voter fraud. Their conclusion? The November 2020 election in Arizona was administered with integrity, and the results were accurate and reliable. This has been proven throughout statutorily required accuracy tests, court tests, hand counts performed by political parties, and post-election audits. No fraud in Arizona.
Let's turn to Georgia. The secretary of state in Georgia published an op-ed in the Washington Post last year to defend his State's results.
He wrote:
Georgia's voting system has never been more secure or
trustworthy.
They had multiple recounts in Georgia, importuned by Trump supporters. They had a hand recount. The result was the same every time: No voter fraud in Georgia.
In Pennsylvania, one Pennsylvania Republican legislator said the following about his own party's efforts to conduct a so-called forensic audit:
The current attempt to discredit the 2020 election runs
headlong into an unmistakable truth: Donald Trump lost
Pennsylvania because Donald Trump received fewer votes.
No fraud in Pennsylvania either.
In Wisconsin, the same story. Newsweek: ``GOP-Aligned Group Finds No Evidence of Wisconsin Voter Fraud After 10-Month Investigation.''
It reads:
A close review, including a hand count of roughly 20,000
ballots from 20 wards, uncovered no evidence of fraudulent
ballots or widespread voter fraud.
The report reads:
Our hand review found that the counts closely matched those
reported by the Wisconsin Elections Commission.
The review found no evidence of fraudulent ballots.
Then we have Michigan. By now, I expect you know how this is going to end. Last summer, the GOP--the Republican-controlled State senate released a much anticipated report examining allegations of fraud within their own State. According to the Detroit News, the report's main author, Senator Ed McBroom, a Republican, said ``he found `no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud,' contradicting months of assertions from some members of his own party, including former President Donald Trump.''
So let's just take a moment to review. No voter fraud in Nevada. None in Arizona, nor in Georgia or Pennsylvania or Wisconsin. No voter fraud in Michigan.
So it is clear that the reason Donald Trump is not in office today is because he didn't receive enough votes to win the election. It is that simple. It is indisputable. The court said so, the States say so, and the facts say so. Indeed, even Donald Trump's own administration said so.
A month after the election, it was none other than former Attorney General Bill Barr himself who made clear that the President was lying to the American people.
In an interview with the AP, the Associated Press, about a month after the election--here is a quote. Barr told the AP that ``U.S. attorneys and FBI agents have been working to follow up specific complaints and misinformation they have received, but, to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.'' Bill Barr, Donald Trump's acolyte, said that.
Months later, Barr said:
My suspicion all the way was that there was nothing there.
It was all [BS].
I will note that Mr. Barr used a different word at the end of that quote, which I am not repeating here.
But this is the Attorney General, the President's acolyte, who sided with him through impeachment and issue after issue. Even he says there is no fraud.
How can so many people still cling to this? Elected officials, responsible elected officials--they are doing damage, true damage, to our Republic--true damage.
I rarely agree with the Attorney General. On this, he is on the mark. The Big Lie is BS--BS.
So let me state once again, although it should hardly need repeating, that the 2020 election was not in dispute. Donald Trump did not have an election stolen from him. Nothing about 2020 was rigged, as he says. But today--today--a frightful amount of Americans still believe what Mr. Trump is saying is true, tens of millions of Americans--a minority, yes, but a sizeable one that cannot be ignored. That is the Big Lie in a nutshell. To them, it doesn't matter that there is no substance to these arguments. To them, it doesn't matter that the President's own allies have debunked it. They want to believe it anyway, and believe it, they do.
Donald Trump, about the most pernicious President we have ever had-- not about; the most pernicious President--no President has done this. Well, he understands that. He understood from the moment the polls closed on election night that all he had to do was repeat the lie again and again and again, and it would take a life of its own.
Now, sadly and greatly troubling the whole country, the Big Lie is poisoning our democracy--poisoning it. Conspiracy theories are spreading online. Cable news anchors are spewing falsehoods and generating a sense of rage among their viewers.
When the courts refused to back the former President, when the States refused to back him, and when some of his own administration refused to back him, he was left with one last-ditch effort to hold on to power: to get the Vice President to reject the results of January 6.
By now, we all know about the dreaded tweet he posted in December of 2020: ``Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!''
What a sad documentation this all is in 21st-century America.
Section 5: The Attack on the Capitol. A Short Review.
It was Donald Trump's Big Lie that soaked our political landscape in kerosene. It was Donald Trump's rally on the Mall on January 6 that struck the match. And then came the fire, and all of us were here 1 year ago yesterday to watch the fire burn.
Yesterday, many of us spent much of the day recounting what it was like to be here in the Capitol on January 6. I want to commend my colleagues for doing so. But it is shameful my Republican colleagues had to come to the floor to speak as well. January 6 was every bit an attack on them as it was on anyone else. It is shameful that my Republican colleagues did not come to the floor to speak as well. They did not come to the floor. This room was empty on this side of the aisle. January 6 was every bit an attack on them as it was on anyone else. All of us suffer when democracy is assaulted. This is not a party matter.
So I want to thank my colleagues who did come to the floor yesterday and everyone across the Capitol who shared their stories yesterday. Many of these stories are painful to visit, but they radiate with the light of truth, and I applaud them all.
Of course, we also pay tribute to all those who put themselves in harm's way to protect us and protect this building: our Capitol Police, our DC Metro Police, our National Guard. They were outnumbered, unprepared, largely left on their own, but they held the line.
When rioters cleared out of the building, another wave of heroes came in: the men and women who work as the maintenance staff, as technicians. They came in into the night, without complaint, and brought the Capitol back to life so that we were able to continue to count the votes and not let this insurrectionist mob stop American democracy from proceeding forward.
Those who came in represent the best of us--the best of us.
Section 6: The Disease of the Big Lie Lives On.
The attack on the U.S. Capitol may have been limited to a single day; the attack on our democracy, unfortunately, has not ceased.
Since last year, there have been no outright attempts to storm this building to undo the will of the people, thank God, but the disease of the Big Lie continues to spread. Donald Trump has not changed his tune. He keeps insisting that our democracy is rigged and that our elections have been riddled with voter fraud. He did it as recently as yesterday. In fact, he was going to have an entire press conference on it before calling it off. It was reported that his own Republican colleagues didn't want to hear him spew his lies on this day that has become so sacred to so many. What Donald Trump does is poison. The consequences of the former President's words continue to erode our democracy day by day.
If the enemies of democracy fail to get their way with baseball bats and pipe bombs, they have now turned their focus to a much quieter, much more organized effort to subvert our democratic process from the bottom up--in other words, a slow-motion insurrection but equally as insidious and ultimately more damaging.
Slow-motion insurrection. ``Democracy experts alarmed over GOP takeover of election machinery.'' That is the AP.
I want to read the following from the AP:
In the weeks leading up to the deadly insurrection at the
U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, a handful of Americans--well-known
politicians, obscure local bureaucrats--stood up to block
then-President . . . Trump's unprecedented attempt to
overturn a free and fair vote of the American people.
[But] in this year since, Trump-aligned Republicans have
worked to clear the path for the next time.
The article continues:
In battleground states--
That is the headline here--
In battleground states and beyond, Republicans are taking
hold of the once-overlooked machinery of elections. While the
effort is incomplete and uneven, outside experts on democracy
and Democrats are sounding alarms, warning that the United
States is witnessing a ``slow-motion insurrection''--
Slow-motion insurrection--
with a better chance of success than Trump's failed power
grab last year.
They point to a mounting list of evidence: Several
candidates who deny Trump's loss are running for offices that
could have a key role in the election of the next president
in 2024.
The efforts are poised to fuel disinformation and anger about the 2020 results for years to come.
This is the heart of the matter of why we are here today. The insurrection that occurred a year ago yesterday is still going on. It may be slow-motion but, in all likelihood, if we do nothing about it, far more damaging to this Republic than even the insurrectionists were on the sixth.
Section 7: Voter Suppression in the States.
It merits repeating again. Twenty-twenty was the safest election we have had in a long time. A record number of Americans cast a ballot that year--over 159 million people. As I have said already, there have been no indications that the result was anything less than free, fair, and accurate.
But despite the fact that the 2020 election was free, fair, and accurate, in the year following the 2020 election, at least 19 Republican-led legislatures suddenly decided to rewrite the rules that govern the way people vote in their respective States. At least 33 new laws have been passed across the country that will, as I will explain in a moment, have the effect of making it harder to vote, harder to register to vote, and, worst of all, potentially empower partisans to arbitrate outcomes of future elections instead of nonpartisan election workers. Hundreds--hundreds--more such laws were proposed, and they may very well get enacted in the near future, particularly if we don't act.
Now, the Republican leader has pointed repeatedly to the 2020 election as proof that there was no effort to suppress the vote. This is nothing but a sleight of hand from the Republican leader. He ignores that the problem today is not about what happened during the 2020 election, it is what happened after.
So, I say to Leader McConnell, when you say there was no problem in 2020, then why do we need to change it? And why do you ignore all the changes that are occurring after 2020? It is sophistry.
Let me say it one more time. It is amazing. The Republican leader has argued that the 2020 election is proof there is no effort to suppress the vote in America, but it is not what happened during 2020 that we are arguing, although Donald Trump called 2020 ``the Big Lie.'' Mr. McConnell is contradicting him, although he never does it directly, for many different nonadmirable reasons.
So any objective observer will admit that different rules have made it harder for people to vote, but the danger is not then, it is what the States have done after the 2020 election, even though some States tried to do it before.
We need to be clear. The timing, the sheer volume, and the nature of these new election laws is not an innocent coincidence. It didn't just happen, springing up in each State on its own. No. Over the course of the year, we have kept hearing the same justification for many of these laws. State Republicans said we need to preserve ``election integrity'' over and over again. They said we need to safeguard against voter fraud.
But take a look at the actual policies that are now law, and tell me if you think they have anything to do with election integrity: Reducing polling hours and polling places within a State? That is now the law in Iowa, Montana, and Texas. What does that have to do with election integrity? Limiting the number, location, or availability of absentee ballot drop boxes--now the law in Georgia, Indiana, and Florida--what does that have to do with election integrity?
Making it harder to register to vote, that is now the law in Texas, Florida, Kansas, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Montana; shortening the window to apply for a mail-in ballots, now the law in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, and Kentucky; and the use of risky or potentially faulty voter purges, now the law in Arizona, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Texas, Utah, and New Hampshire; increasing barriers for voters with disabilities, that is now the law in Alabama, Iowa, and Texas--which passed not one but two laws which will have that effect.
Telling disabled people it is going to be harder for you to vote, what does that have to do with election integrity?
Here is an especially egregious one: limiting early voting days or hours--Georgia, Iowa, Texas. And, of course, as many have condemned for months, criminalizing giving food and water to voters waiting in line to vote. That is now the law in Georgia and Florida.
When Republicans say it is a crime to give voters some food or water in line, do they think they are preventing fraud by denying people a snack?
Kafkaesque--Kafka was writing about the demise of democracy.
Now, in addition to these new laws that are actually on the books, we also need to remember all the proposals they have tried to pass but have not been able to do to date. They tell us all we need to know about the true intentions of these reforms, these so-called proposed laws.
The most reprehensible were, of course, the attempts in States like Georgia and Texas to eliminate early voting on Sunday--a day, of course, when many churchgoing African Americans participate in ``souls to the polls.'' Did they show that Sunday voting is more fraudulent than other voting? No. We know what they are up to.
What an astonishing coincidence, outlawing voting on a day when African-American churches sponsor a get-out-the-vote effort. Have they shown that using drop-off ballot boxes creates more fraud than other? No. These are aimed at suppressing certain types of people from voting, not everybody.
Policies like these have nothing to do with election integrity. When you say you can't vote on Sunday, it is the same intention of those old restrictions that used to require African Americans to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar before they were allowed to cast a ballot. What regression.
Now, of course, our Republican friends--many of them--reject these ideas. It is not a surprise. But every so often, they speak with astonishing and stunning honesty. As one State rep in Arizona said when defending his State's efforts to defend Republican voting: Everyone shouldn't be voting.
That is what he said. I wonder who ``everyone'' was? Indeed, he actually said, ``We don't mind putting security measures in that won't let everybody vote--but everybody shouldn't be voting.''
And every now and then, the very plain and simple truth makes its way to the surface.
When you lose an election, you are not supposed to stop people from voting, even if they didn't vote for you. That is democracy, my Republican friends. That is democracy. If you lose an election, you are supposed to try harder to win over the voters you lost. Instead, Republicans across the country are trying to stop the other side from voting. That tears apart--rips apart--the very fabric of our democracy.
So let's be abundantly clear. These anti-voter laws are on the books today only--only--because their authors cited the Big Lie and are trying to succeed where the insurrection failed. A slow-motion insurrection, that is all it is, equally, if not more damaging to our Republic.
Section 9: Election subversion. Disenfranchising millions of Americans is bad enough, but there is actually another more sinister component to these laws, because Republicans aren't just trying to suppress the vote, they are trying to subvert the vote. They are trying to subvert the very machinery of the Democratic process itself.
It is not enough that they make it harder for people to vote; they are making it more likely that those who do vote could see--God forbid--their ballots called into question, subject to unwarranted and dangerous scrutiny, and maybe get thrown out entirely.
In States like Arizona, Kansas, Arkansas, Georgia, Republican legislatures are trying to give more power to themselves and other partisan bodies to undermine, override, or neuter bipartisan election boards and county election officials. In a number of States, they have already succeeded.
Last August, a report from ABC News noted that at least 10 new State laws have shifted power over elections from nonpartisan election officials to partisan entities--from nonpartisan people to partisan entities. Why? It is obvious to figure that out.
Here is what ABC News said:
Among the dozens of election reform laws changing rules
regarding how voters cast ballots, several have also
diminished secretaries of states' authority over elections or
shifted aspects of election administration to highly partisan
bodies, such as state legislators themselves or unevenly
bipartisan election boards.
A separate report from Protect Democracy, a nonprofit founded by former White House and DOJ officials, warned last summer that:
Many state legislatures are pursuing a strategy to
politicize, criminalize, and interfere in election
administration. Their course of action threatens the
foundations of fair, professional, and non-partisan
elections.
Let's go through some of the examples. In Arizona, ABC News reported last August that under a new law passed by the Republican legislature:
The Arizona Democratic secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, can
no longer represent the state in lawsuits defending its
election code. The power now lies exclusively with the
Republican attorney general--but only through January 2,
2023, when [coincidentally] Hobbs' term ends.
That is now the law in Arizona.
In Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has now been effectively fired from the State election board, months after refusing to go along with President Trump's request to ``find enough votes'' to secure him a win.
Appalling, my friends. Donald Trump calls up and asks the secretary of state of his own party to find enough votes. He gets fired, and they are all defending it or shrugging their shoulders or putting their heads in the sand. I have never seen anything quite like this.
By the way, for those who don't know, the State election board in Georgia is responsible for, among other things--investigating voter irregularities. Amazing, just amazing.
There are other examples across the country. Let's turn to Texas.
According to the Voting Rights Lab, a particularly sinister new policy is now the law in that State:
The recently-enacted election omnibus bill, S.B. 1,
prohibits local officials from modifying election procedures
to better serve voters. It also increases the likelihood of
partisan poll watchers disrupting polling places and ballot
verification and counting locations. The bill increased the
ability of poll watchers to move freely throughout an
election location, including areas containing voters waiting
in line, checking in, or casting their ballots.
Again, it is helpful to look at those pernicious proposals that were introduced at the State level but to date have not been enacted into law.
One bill in Arizona would have given flat out to the State legislature the authority to cancel the certification of electors by a simple majority vote.
So looking through the record, the conclusion is not in doubt. Republicans across the board justify these new laws by saying they want to make it easier to vote but harder to cheat, but when you are looking at what they are actually doing, it is perfectly clear that they are doing the opposite--the exact opposite--making it harder to vote and easier to steal an election.
And this, my friends, is just the tip of the iceberg. These State legislatures will soon return to session this year and keep going, all importuned by Donald Trump's Big Lie.
And what is missing is the profile in courage--enough profiles in courage--enough people, whether it is in this Senate Chamber, in the House Chamber, in the legislatures on the Republican side, saying: I want to be a Republican. I want Republicans to win, but I am not going to stoop to this level of beginning to dismember our democracy.
Let's make a final crucial point about what we are seeing playing out in the States. Everything I just described at the State level is being done on a partisan basis. This is a Republican con job, with zero efforts being made to get any input from Democrats.
Should State Republican legislatures keep going? Should we in this Chamber fail to do something about it or respond with insufficient force, our democracy could very well cross a fatal point of no return.
And then the unthinkable becomes real. Democracy erodes and could-- horror of horrors--vanish, as it has in other nations in the course of world history. What history shows us is, when these pernicious activities start, when a mob starts, when a leader just lies to gain power, if people don't rise up, it happens.
America, don't be complacent. It is happening, and it is a great danger. In many other countries that devolved to dictatorship, it started in ways similar to this, and the majority of good people said, ``Uh, we don't have to worry about it.''
Well, we do. That is why we are here. That is why Senator Merkley and I and Klobuchar and Durbin and others have taken to the floor today.
Section 10: The Senate will vote again on voting rights.
So what is the way forward? Do we accept these developments as inevitable? Do we say it is not so bad? Do we look the other way? Do we tell ourselves this dark cloud will pass and the disease of the Big Lie is just going to cure itself?
We can't. The risk is too great.
What we must do is remember the words of our great friend, John Lewis, who shortly before his death said:
When you see something that is not right, you must say
something. You must do something. Democracy is not a state.
It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help
build what we called the Beloved Community. . . .
Well, right now, the Senate is being called to take action. So as soon as next week, we intend to bring up legislation back to the floor of this Chamber, to protect our democracy and shore up the right to vote. Everyone in this Chamber will once again have the opportunity to go on record.
Will Republicans join Democrats in a bipartisan manner moving forward on defending democracy? As soon as next week, they will be called on to give us an answer, and they know the eyes of history are watching. Maybe the few ideologues don't, but most of them do--most of them do.
And next week, our Republican friends will be called to give us an answer. If there is any fight that this body should know how to win, it is protecting our democracy and strengthening our right to vote.
Throughout this Chamber's history, in the aftermath of the Civil War, during the 1960s, throughout the second half of the 20th century, passing voting rights legislation has been one of the Senate's crowning achievements. And now, in this moment of peril for democracy, the Senate now needs to work to pass the Freedom to Vote Act. We need to work to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
We must get both done so we can send these bills to President Biden's desk and they be signed into law--preventing, undoing, the pernicious activities that I have documented in the past hour.
For months--for months--we have tried to get our Republican colleagues to join us. After all, voting rights should not be partisan. It hasn't been in the past. It has been supported by Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush--hardly big liberals, hardly Democratic sympathizers--oh, no.
We have tried to continue in that bipartisan spirit. We have tried no less than four times to begin a simple debate here on the floor about this matter. We have lobbied our Republican friends privately. We have gone through regular order. We have attempted to debate them on the floor. We have presented reasonable, commonsense proposals in June, August, October, and November. Each time--each time--I personally promised my Republican colleagues and my Democratic colleagues, particularly the two who have some doubts, that they would have ample opportunities to voice their concerns, offer germane amendments, and make changes to our proposals. At no point did we ever ask our Republican friends to vote for our legislation. We have simply been asking them to begin debating, just as the Senate was intended to do.
Off the floor, we have held public hearings, group discussions with Senators, and one-on-one meetings with the other side to try to win some support. Senators Manchin and Kaine and Tester and King and Durbin and Klobuchar and Leahy and many more have all met with Republicans to initiate a dialogue. At every turn, we have been met with resistance. Next week, we will try again. They will go on record again. But, of course, obstruction is all we have been able to see so far.
As an aside, one of the arguments we hear from the other side is that this is an attempt at a Federal takeover of our elections. The sophistry, the dishonesty is legion.
The Founders, whom my Republican colleagues invoke when it is time to confirm a rightwing judge, wrote in the Constitution that the Congress precisely has the power to pass laws to determine the time, place, and manner of Federal elections. This is nothing new. We have done it over and over again with amendments and with legislation--bipartisan.
The problem isn't simply that they oppose our proposals for voting rights legislation. They now even refuse to support legislation they embraced in the past, including the policies in the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
Remember, the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized five times through its history, including by Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and Bush.
Many of my Republican colleagues have worked in the past to improve preclearance provisions similar to the ones contained in our latest proposal.
If it was good enough for Republicans back then--Republicans who were true conservatives--it should be good enough for our Republican friends today. But they won't even support that. In fact, they won't even support a vote to open debate.
The sole exception in 10 months has been our colleague, the Senator from Alaska--once on four votes. But where is the rest of the party of Abraham Lincoln? Down to the last Member, the rest of the Republican conference has refused to engage, refused to debate, even refused to acknowledge that our country faces a serious threat to democracy.
Leader McConnell, this week, seemed to refer to laws I talked about earlier as mainstream here on the floor. What is he talking about? Maybe they are mainstream in failed democracies, but his proposals are unacceptable in the United States.
So it is clear that the modern Republican Party has turned its back on protecting voting rights. The party of Lincoln is increasingly becoming the party of the Big Lie, not just Donald Trump but just everybody here, with the rare exception.
Section 11: Restore the Senate. The Senate is better than this. A simple look at our history shows we are better than this. The same institution that passed civil rights legislation, the New Deal, the Great Society, and the bills of Reconstruction, should be more than capable of defending democracy in the modern era. But, today, the partisanship, the Big Lie, the looming specter of Donald Trump and his vindictiveness, his dishonesty, is a shadow that is cast over this entire Chamber and leads to the gridlock we have.
This Chamber is not capable of functioning when one side's strategy for legislation is inflexible, total, unthinking, unwilling to admit fact and actually making up lies to buttress the Big Lie, such as that the Federal Government shouldn't be involved in how Federal offices are voted for.
The Senate is no longer a cooling saucer. It is a deep freezer. Anyone who has been here for more than a few years knows the gears of the Senate have ossified. The filibuster is used far more today than ever before--by some measures, the filibuster is used as much as 10 times today compared to the past decade. My colleague from Oregon is an expert on this, and my guess is he will speak on it.
Some might wonder if any of the great accomplishments of the past would have had a chance of passage today. Would the Social Security Act pass the modern Senate? Medicare and Medicaid? Civil rights? We sure hope they would, but it is difficult to see with the way the Chamber works this day.
As I have said since the fall, if this sort of obstruction will continue, I believe the Senate needs to be restored to its rightful status as the world's greatest deliberative body. It was that in the past. It is certainly, certainly, not that now. It earned that title precisely because, yes, debate is a central feature of this body and always will be. But at the end of the day, so is governing, so is taking action when needed once the debate has run its due course.
This is an old, old fight in this Chamber. Over 100 years ago, the great Senator of Massachusetts, Henry Cabot Lodge, said that ``to vote without debating is perilous, but to debate and never vote is imbecile.''
``To vote without debating is perilous, but to debate and never vote is imbecile.'' We should heed those words today, and Democrats are currently exploring the paths we have available to restore the Senate so it does what the Framers intended: debate, deliberate, compromise, and end in the vote.
As I said in my ``Dear colleague'' earlier this week, if Republicans continue to hijack the rules of the Chamber to prevent us from protecting our democracy, then the Senate will debate and consider changes to the rules on or before January 17, Martin Luther King, Jr., Day.
As we hold this debate, I ask my colleagues to consider this question: If the right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy, then how can Democrats permit a situation in which Republicans can pass voter suppression laws at the State-level with only a simple majority vote but not allow the U.S. Senate to do the same?
This asymmetry cannot hold. If Senate Republicans continue to abuse the filibuster to prevent this body from acting, then I would plead with the Senate, particularly my colleagues on this side of the aisle, to adapt. And we must adapt for the sake of our democracy so we can pass the legislation I talked about earlier.
In conclusion--the last section--now, as I near the end of my remarks, let me appeal to an important moment from history. In the aftermath of the Civil War and as the Nation began the colossal work of Reconstruction, America was more divided than at any point in history. I am reading Grant's biography now. That is clear. It was hard to imagine that a single nation could endure after the bloody conflict of the previous 4 years.
At the time, the Congress set to work on granting newly freed slaves the basic freedoms that had long been denied to them. Back then, it was the party of Lincoln, which a century and a half later bears little resemblance to what we see among their ranks today. These freedoms were eventually enshrined federally in the 14th and 15th Amendments, granting due process and the right to vote to all citizens, regardless of color or race.
Today, these amendments rank as some of the greatest and most revered accomplishments in congressional history. They are proof that our country is capable of living up to its founding promise, if--if--we are willing to put in the work.
But at the time, the minority party in both Chambers refused to offer a single vote--a single vote--for any one of the civil rights legislations put forth during Reconstruction--not one vote, not one vote. And it was, of course, the Democratic Party that was not offering the vote. They argued these bills represented nothing more than the partisan interest of a majority--a power grab, they said, if you will, from vengeful northerners.
But that didn't stop the majority. If basic freedoms meant going it alone, they knew they had to do it.
To the patriots after the Civil War, this wasn't partisan. It was patriotic, and the American democracy is better off today because the patriots in this Chamber at the time were undeterred by minority obstruction.
On this day--on this day--the day after we mark the 1-year anniversary of an armed insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, rooted in the Big Lie that is eroding our democracy, the question before the Senate is, How will we find a path forward on protecting our freedoms in the 21st century?
Members of this body now face a choice. They can follow in the footsteps of our patriotic predecessors in this Chamber or they can sit by, just as the segregationist-oriented Democrats in the post-Civil War era did it, and try to have democracy unravel.
I do not believe that we want our democracy to unravel. I do not believe it is the ultimate destiny of this country. It is a grand country--as the Founding Fathers called it, ``God's noble experiment.''
I believe--I truly believe--our democracy will long endure after these latest attacks. I believe that because of what I said at the very beginning of my remarks: The long history of this country is a long march toward expanding our democracy, toward making more perfect what our Founders sought to establish.
It took millions of Americans hundreds of years to make this country what it is today--Americans of every age and color and creed who marched and protested, who stood up and sat in; Americans who died defending democracy in its darkest and lowest hours.
On Memorial Day in 1884, Oliver Wendell Holmes told his war-weary audience that ``whether [one] accepts from Fortune her spade, and will look downward and dig, or from Aspiration her axe and cord, and will scale the ice, the one and only one success which it is [yours] to command is to bring to [your] work a mighty heart.''
I have confidence that Americans of a different generation--our generation, those of us in this Chamber--will bring to our work a mighty heart: to fight for what is right, to fight for the truth, to never lose faith, and to protect the precious gift handed down to us by those brilliant Framers. And by the grace of God, I know that our democracy shall not perish in this hour but rather endure today, tomorrow, and for generations to come.
I yield the floor.