Floor Statements

Mr. President, first, let me thank my friend, our chairman of the Judiciary, Senator Leahy, not only for introducing this legislation but for his dedication to voting rights over the many decades that he has served in this body. Few have done more to push voting rights to make sure people have the right to vote without some of the barriers that have always been placed in the way by people who want to discriminate against people--particularly people of color--when it comes to voting. So I thank him.

Mr. President, the story of American democracy is a messy tale of starts and stops. For over 240 years, our march to establish the United States as a full democracy has always seemed to involve two steps forward, one step back.

Today, I am proud to join my colleagues, Senators Leahy and Durbin, as they lead this Chamber in another bold step forward by introducing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, a long-overdue update to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. No piece of legislation has done more to protect the franchise than the Voting Rights

Act of the sixties. Its critical preclearance provision compelled jurisdictions with recent histories of discrimination to secure Federal approval before amending their election laws.

For decades, the Senate reauthorized the VRA's preclearance provisions with bipartisan votes because both parties understood that this powerful Federal tool made our democracy stronger. Sadly, in 2013, a conservative majority on the Supreme Court gutted the VRA's preclearance and cleared the way for some of the most repressive voter suppression laws we have seen in generations.

For those Supreme Court Justices who said this is not necessary, I think they should look at what as happened since preclearance was eliminated. It is just awful, and it was one of the lowest moments of the Supreme Court in recent memory: the Shelby decision.

Now, because of that Shelby decision, in 2021, 19 States, just in this year, 2021, have enacted 33 laws that will limit Americans' access to the ballot, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. What we are seeing across the States today is nothing short of Jim Crow in the 21st century, aided and abetted and allowed by the Shelby decision, which so tied the hands of the Justice Department when discriminatory legislation was being enacted at the State level.

The Senate must fight back. We must restore the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act and retailor it to meet the challenges of the 21st century. That is what the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act will do. As an important complement to the Freedom to Vote Act, it will reestablish the VRA's preclearance coverage formula--based on an updated, robust catalog of modern-day voter suppression laws--while adopting new provisions to address the next generation of suppressive voting. This new bill also responds to the Court's troubling ruling in Brnovich earlier this year, which even further weakened the VRA's protections against State practices that hinder minorities seeking to vote.

We have to be brutally honest. This country has to look at itself in the mirror. Racial barriers to the ballot are, regrettably, part of our past, our present, and now, with some of these decisions, part of our future. When the Nation was founded, you had to be a White male Protestant property owner in many of the States to vote. Today, we have come a long way in our struggle to live up to our country's founding promise, and this bill takes the next step by restoring the proper role of the Federal Government to protect Americans' constitutional right to participate in our democracy.

As Senator Warnock has so eloquently stated, we must put out the fire that is presently engulfing our democracy, and that is what the Freedom to Vote Act will do. We must build a state-of-the-art fire department to prevent future fires. That is what the reforms of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act will do.

This is a good bill. This is an urgent bill. As majority leader, it is my intention to hold a vote on this legislation in the near future. I am proud to designate this ``S. 4'' to mark its critical restoration of the section 4 preclearance formula.

We hope that all of our colleagues will join us in good faith in advancing solutions to ensure all Americans have their voices heard in their democracy. If some of our colleagues on the other side have different ideas of how to protect free and fair elections, we urge them to put them forward. But we will not be deterred just because some of our colleagues choose to stand silent with their arms crossed, content to play politics with the health of our Republic. On this issue, the Senate must act, and we will act.

I want to thank again my colleagues Senators Leahy and Durbin for their diligence and leadership on this important piece of legislation and for all they do to make sure this Chamber always works to strengthen our precious democracy.

Mr. President, first, let me thank my friend, our chairman of the Judiciary, Senator Leahy, not only for introducing this legislation but for his dedication to voting rights over the many decades that he has served in this body. Few have done more to push voting rights to make sure people have the right to vote without some of the barriers that have always been placed in the way by people who want to discriminate against people--particularly people of color--when it comes to voting. So I thank him.

Mr. President, the story of American democracy is a messy tale of starts and stops. For over 240 years, our march to establish the United States as a full democracy has always seemed to involve two steps forward, one step back.

Today, I am proud to join my colleagues, Senators Leahy and Durbin, as they lead this Chamber in another bold step forward by introducing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, a long-overdue update to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. No piece of legislation has done more to protect the franchise than the Voting Rights

Act of the sixties. Its critical preclearance provision compelled jurisdictions with recent histories of discrimination to secure Federal approval before amending their election laws.

For decades, the Senate reauthorized the VRA's preclearance provisions with bipartisan votes because both parties understood that this powerful Federal tool made our democracy stronger. Sadly, in 2013, a conservative majority on the Supreme Court gutted the VRA's preclearance and cleared the way for some of the most repressive voter suppression laws we have seen in generations.

For those Supreme Court Justices who said this is not necessary, I think they should look at what as happened since preclearance was eliminated. It is just awful, and it was one of the lowest moments of the Supreme Court in recent memory: the Shelby decision.

Now, because of that Shelby decision, in 2021, 19 States, just in this year, 2021, have enacted 33 laws that will limit Americans' access to the ballot, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. What we are seeing across the States today is nothing short of Jim Crow in the 21st century, aided and abetted and allowed by the Shelby decision, which so tied the hands of the Justice Department when discriminatory legislation was being enacted at the State level.

The Senate must fight back. We must restore the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act and retailor it to meet the challenges of the 21st century. That is what the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act will do. As an important complement to the Freedom to Vote Act, it will reestablish the VRA's preclearance coverage formula--based on an updated, robust catalog of modern-day voter suppression laws--while adopting new provisions to address the next generation of suppressive voting. This new bill also responds to the Court's troubling ruling in Brnovich earlier this year, which even further weakened the VRA's protections against State practices that hinder minorities seeking to vote.

We have to be brutally honest. This country has to look at itself in the mirror. Racial barriers to the ballot are, regrettably, part of our past, our present, and now, with some of these decisions, part of our future. When the Nation was founded, you had to be a White male Protestant property owner in many of the States to vote. Today, we have come a long way in our struggle to live up to our country's founding promise, and this bill takes the next step by restoring the proper role of the Federal Government to protect Americans' constitutional right to participate in our democracy.

As Senator Warnock has so eloquently stated, we must put out the fire that is presently engulfing our democracy, and that is what the Freedom to Vote Act will do. We must build a state-of-the-art fire department to prevent future fires. That is what the reforms of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act will do.

This is a good bill. This is an urgent bill. As majority leader, it is my intention to hold a vote on this legislation in the near future. I am proud to designate this ``S. 4'' to mark its critical restoration of the section 4 preclearance formula.

We hope that all of our colleagues will join us in good faith in advancing solutions to ensure all Americans have their voices heard in their democracy. If some of our colleagues on the other side have different ideas of how to protect free and fair elections, we urge them to put them forward. But we will not be deterred just because some of our colleagues choose to stand silent with their arms crossed, content to play politics with the health of our Republic. On this issue, the Senate must act, and we will act.

I want to thank again my colleagues Senators Leahy and Durbin for their diligence and leadership on this important piece of legislation and for all they do to make sure this Chamber always works to strengthen our precious democracy.

Take your time. I am going to get settled.

Madam President, I thank my dear friend, our majority whip and the senior Senator from the State of Illinois, as well as someone who was my roommate for, well, decades, I guess.

Madam President, on the day that this majority commenced its work, I promised that this Chamber would meet the challenges that face our Nation ``not with timid solutions but with boldness and [with] courage.'' Now the 117th Congress stands at a pivotal moment in our pursuit of this goal.

Over the past few months, both Chambers have dedicated themselves to passing two transformative, once-in-a-generation pieces of legislation: the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better agenda.

Doing big things in Congress is always hard, but we didn't choose elected office just to pursue the easy things. In the days and weeks to come, Senate Democrats will remain focused on passing the agenda we promised no matter how hard the task.

All last week, I held extensive talks with the Speaker, the President, and my Senate colleagues to bring us closer to a final agreement on our Build Back Better agenda. We made important progress, but there is more work to do.

So, this week, I will continue meeting with my colleagues in an effort to produce a bill that all of us can get behind.

Last Friday, President Biden spoke to House Democrats about the path forward for passing our ambitious agenda into law. His message was simple: If we stick together, if we work to find a legislative sweet spot that we can all support, then we will succeed.

He is right, and that is exactly what we are going to do.

As I explained this morning in my ``Dear Colleague,'' our new legislative goal must be to get both the infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better agenda done by the end of October.

The reason is simple: The infrastructure bill, for all its historic investments, is also a reauthorization of the highway trust fund. We passed a 30-day patch over the weekend to keep vital programs going. But as it stands, the trust fund is set to run out of money by the end of October.

If we are going to meet this deadline, Democrats must arrive at a final agreement on the details of the Build Back Better agenda as soon as possible, preferably within a matter of days, not weeks. It is the only way we can give committees enough time to draft legislation to ensure its privileged status in our Chamber and complete the reconciliation process before the end of the month.

Now, none of this is going to be easy. It will require sacrifice, compromise, and finding common ground. Nobody is going to get everything they want.

But no matter what, our final proposal will deliver the core promise we made to the American people: We will take bold action on climate change, while creating millions of jobs; we will expand healthcare opportunities and lower costs for working Americans; and we will cut taxes for the working and middle class, while asking the wealthy to pay their fair share.

I am confident we will be proud of the end result: a bill that will dramatically improve the lives of every single American not just for today but for generations; a bill that will rebuild ladders for working people to get to the middle class, help people stay in the middle class who are there already, and rekindle--rekindle--that sunny American disposition so central to our national identity but seems to be fading a bit in the last while.

This is worth a couple of hard days. This is worth many hard days. Again, we didn't come to Washington to take the easy way out. We came here committed to work every day, to reward the faith that the American people have placed in us. We came here to get big things done, and that is exactly what we will do in the weeks ahead.

Madam President, now, on the debt ceiling, before the end of this week, the Senate must--must--get a bill to the President's desk to address the acute crisis of the debt limit.

President Biden was crystal clear in his speech this morning. If Republicans don't get out of the way and let the Senate take action now, our government will in all likelihood enter default for the first time ever.

Sadly, the Republican position as the party of default has now become so extreme that they have blocked every single attempt to prevent a default from happening, putting our country in serious, serious danger. They have gone so far as rejecting their own requests for how the debt ceiling should be

raised. Their own requests for putting those in action--they are now saying no. Why do you think? Why do you think?

Now the Republican leader has repeatedly stated that the Democrats must raise the debt ceiling on our own, and he has directly cited precedents of 2003, 2004, and 2006 when the Senate voted to raise the debt ceiling by a majority vote. But what he conveniently and repeatedly ignores--and he knows better--he ignores that in each of those examples, the minority allowed an up-or-down vote without-- without--a partisan filibuster. In other words, the other side said: Get us to 50 votes, and we won't make you get to 60.

That is just what we are asking for now. We are proposing the same offer now, which Leader McConnell has cited. Let us vote to raise the debt ceiling without a partisan filibuster. In fact, this was the thrust of my consent request last week, which would have resolved this Republican-driven default crisis with an up-or-down vote. Republicans could have gotten their chance to vote no, and we could all have put an end to this needless impasse. But given the easiest way out of the mess, the Republicans still refuse to take ``yes'' for an answer. Now our country is on the brink of a crisis whose consequences will reverberate around the world.

The bottom line is, this Chamber must pass legislation to avoid a default. Accordingly, I will soon file cloture on the House-passed proposal that will suspend the debt limit until December of 2022. We aren't asking Republicans to support it when it comes time for a vote; we only ask that they get out of the way as Democrats pass it on our own, just as the majority party did in the early 2000s. It is really that simple. If Republicans want to vote to stop payments from going to Social Security recipients or veterans, then be my guest, but they ought to get out of the way and let the legislation pass the Senate.

The fact is, we don't have the luxury of waiting until October 18 to extend the debt ceiling. Even a near miss can have dramatic consequences. Every single day we delay taking action, we increase the chances of doing irreversible damage to our global financial system, our economic recovery, and trust in our country's ability to pay its debts.

So, again, we will need to get a bill extending the debt ceiling to the President's desk by the end of this week. We aren't asking Republicans to vote yes even though it is debt that they incurred; we are simply asking that they get out of the way.

I yield the floor, and I thank my colleague for his courtesy.

I move to proceed to legislative session.

I move to proceed to executive session to consider Calendar No. 340.

I send a cloture motion to the desk.

I move to proceed to legislative session.

I have a cloture motion at the desk.

I ask unanimous consent that the mandatory quorum call for the cloture motions filed today, October 4, be waived.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that S. Res. 357 be star printed with the changes at the desk.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 10 a.m. tomorrow, Tuesday, October 5; that following the prayer and pledge, the morning hour be deemed expired, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and morning business be closed; that upon the conclusion of morning business, the Senate proceed to executive session to resume consideration of the Adams-Allen nomination, as provided under the previous order; further, that the Senate recess following the cloture vote on the Adams-Allen nomination until 2:15 p.m. to allow for the weekly caucus meetings; that all postcloture debate time on the Adams- Allen nomination expire at 2:15 p.m.; finally, if any nominations are confirmed on Tuesday, the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table and the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action.

Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that it stand adjourned under the previous order.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.