Floor Statements

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 506, submitted earlier today.

I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 507, submitted earlier today.

I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, that the preamble be agreed to, and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, I understand that there are three bills at the desk, and I ask for their first reading en bloc.

I would now ask for a second reading, and I object to my own request, all en bloc.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Armed Services be discharged from further consideration and the Senate now proceed to S. Res. 424.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, that the preamble be agreed to, and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 10 a.m., Wednesday, February 9; further, 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 Bush nomination; further, that at 11:30 a.m., the Senate vote on confirmation of the Nathan nomination and that following disposition of the Nathan nomination, the Senate vote on the motion to invoke cloture on the Bush nomination; that if cloture is invoked on the Bush nomination, all postcloture time be considered expired at 2:15 p.m.; finally, that if any nominations are confirmed during Wednesday's session, 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, following the remarks of Senator Portman.

Mr. President, as we head toward the final hour of debate, I want to just bring us back about 20 feet to talk about the stakes that we are laboring under tonight.

I want to talk a little bit about the big picture of why this matters.

I know we have changed the rules 160 times in the history of the Senate, but I will submit that it is still an extraordinary endeavor to ask our colleagues to change the rules and traditions of this body.

And so here is what I want to say: It is really important to remember that democracy, this idea that every member of our country, every member of the community gets an equal say in the rules that govern us, it is unnatural.

Why do I know this? Because I want you to think of every organization in your life that matters. Your workplace; it doesn't give equal votes to every employee as to the direction of the company. Think about your favorite sports team. There is not a vote from all the players about the lineups or the strategy of the team. The Sunday sermon at your church isn't chosen by an online poll of the congregation.

I love my kids, but they don't get an equal say with me and my wife about the rules of our house.

When you look out over the long stretch of human history, it is no wonder that 99.9 percent of humans have lived under governments that were monarchies or sultanates or autocracies.

Since the beginning of time, human beings have preferred, have been naturally drawn to or maybe have been trapped in hierarchal systems where the strong and the powerful make the decisions for everyone else.

The idea that humans, both the weak and the powerful, the rich and the poor, should decide together, each person having equal weight, the course of their Nation--this idea is revolutionary.

There have been experiments over the course of world history, but no nation has sustained this idea longer than this one. In historical context, our democracy should be perceived as a tiny, fragile port in the middle of a raging storm, and none of us should be surprised that once in a while some Americans, drawn to the old system of control by the strong and powerful, decide that it is time to give up and submit to the battering winds.

That is the moment we are in today. Just in the last few days, former President Donald Trump, the leader of the Republican Party and their likely candidate for President in 2024, once again, made clear his intent.

He said last week:

We have to be a lot sharper the next time when it comes to

counting the votes. . . . Sometimes the vote counter is more

important than the candidate.

The leader of the Republican Party isn't even trying to hide his agenda any longer. State after State is changing the rules of who counts the votes so that only the allies of Donald Trump can decide which votes count and which votes don't.

Now, much of the focus today, understandably, has been on the unconscionable rules that limit the ability of poor people or people of color to vote, and it is heinous that Black voters have to wait in lines that are two times or ten times longer than a White voter. But democracy may actually collapse when Trump's plan to rig the next count succeeds in plain view for everybody to see. He broadcasts that in the next election the vote counting will be more important than the quality of the candidates.

Why? Because the plan is to install Donald Trump as President, whether or not he actually wins the election, just like he tried to do after the 2020 election.

Can anybody really deny that this is the agenda?

Of course, that is what he is doing, because it is what he tried to do transparently, unapologetically in 2020, and that is what he is telling us he is going to do in 2024. At some point, we just have to believe what we see and what we hear.

And I appreciate Senator Thune coming to the floor earlier today and telling us that he believed Joe Biden won the election and that when he faced a close election, he submitted to the will of the voters. But Senator Thune is not the mainstream of the Republican Party today. In fact, those that believe Joe Biden won the election in the Republican Party are the dead limbs of an otherwise perfectly healthy tree. The trunk of that tree is Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene and all those who believe that Joe Biden is an illegitimate President. That is what 70 percent of Republicans believe today.

If mainstream Republicans in this body came to Connecticut and held a rally, a dozen people would show up. Marjorie Taylor Greene came to my State and 3,000 Republicans came--more than I have ever seen show up for a Republican, because that is the mainstream of the Republican Party.

Today, we are voting on a proposal to change our rules so that we can protect our democracy and the rules that have stood for generations to assure that both parties continue to have a role in counting the votes. And while it feels astonishing that not a single Republican is going to join us today--not the Trump cheerleaders nor the sometimes critics of the former President--maybe it shouldn't be that shocking, because of that natural state that billions of humans have defaulted to over the millennium, the unelected rich and powerful being in charge of everything and setting the rules for everyone else.

It might square perfectly with Republicans' agenda. For the last decade, the entire legislative agenda here, when Republicans have been in charge, has been about giving more power, more money, more influence to the rich and powerful. They oppose President Biden's agenda to give tax breaks to the poor and the middle class or to cut profits for the drug companies, because it empowers that agenda, often the weak and the powerless.

Maybe Republicans aren't fighting to protect democracy like Democrats are because a reversion to a world where just the rich and powerful run the country just isn't as scary to that side of this body as it is to this side.

I wish it weren't up to us. I wish it didn't have to come to this. I wish it was not only Democrats that see the miracle of our fragile democracy, because the idea that a worker making $12 an hour has just as much say in the future of their country as the CEO making $12 million a year, it is revolutionary. It is unnatural. And it matters more than anything, even the traditions and the rules of the Senate.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, first and foremost, let me thank Senator Shaheen. She has been a leader in the Senate and in our caucus on raising alarms about the danger of Nord Stream 2 to European security and Ukrainian security. I have been so glad to work with her over these past several years, and I am here on the floor to join her in our strong opposition to the legislation that is pending on the floor as we speak.

If this bill passes, it won't make the Nord Stream Pipeline any less likely. It won't stop Russia from invading Ukraine. In fact, it will do the exact opposite. It will make the completion of Nord Stream more likely, and it will be a gift to Russia, dividing us from our European allies right at the moment when we need to be in solidarity with them in order to deter Russian aggression.

I will try not to repeat too much of what Senator Shaheen has said, but let me just underscore the points she has made.

First, the sanctions in this bill are, unfortunately, pretty feckless. They are feckless because they can be undone easily, within 30 to 60 days, by the Russian Government.

The reality is, if we don't convince our European partners to stop moving forward with this project, there is no amount of U.S. sanction that can be effective here. What we know is that even if you were to sanction this German-Swiss company, the German board of directors, in a matter of days, weeks, maybe a few months, the Russians could reengineer the financing and the administration of the project to keep it going.

Even more interesting to me is what Senator McConnell just said. Senator McConnell just came to floor and said that while he supports Senator Cruz's proposal, he expects that the Biden administration will waive the sanctions. So then why are we engaging in this in the first place if Republicans are going to support the waiving of the sanctions? Because the sanctions would interrupt our negotiations with Germany, why pass the bill in the first place?

So, apparently, many Republicans are supporting the Cruz bill but then are going to be asking the Biden administration to not implement it. That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.

The primary impact of this bill, as Senator Shaheen explained, is to divide us from Germany. Why is that? Because we know that the only way to stop Nord Stream 2 is by convincing the Germans and other Europeans to stop the project.

Now, we have, for the first time since we began talking to the Germans about this, convinced them to press pause--the first time the German Government has decided to press pause through their regulatory agencies. They have stopped the certification of the pipeline, which, by the way, is built. It was 95 percent built when President Trump left office. He let it be constructed--95 percent built. It is now 100 percent built.

But the Germans have, because of American diplomacy and because of the threat of invasion of Ukraine from Russia, pressed pause on this project. It can't start until the summer or the fall, and, frankly, that time allows us to continue to engage with the Germans and others to try to convince them that this project is not in their interest.

So think about this from the German perspective. They finally said yes to the United States, and the minute they say yes is the minute the U.S. Senate decides to sanction German citizens. That is bad diplomacy. It is just bad diplomacy. It is a moment at which we have to be in lockstep with our European partners. We need to be sending a message to Vladimir Putin that the United States and Europe are together and that we are going to deliver a crushing package of sanctions if you enter Ukraine any further.

This would be a gift to Vladimir Putin because it is a signal of division at a moment when we need to be standing together.

Senator Menendez has the right approach. Senator Menendez has proposed a bill which I think can draw support from 90 percent of this body that enacts a set of sanctions on Russia if Russia moves any farther into Ukraine beyond where they are already in eastern Ukraine and Crimea. That sends the right signal. That is an effective message of consequence rather than this proposal, which apparently is a set of sanctions Republicans are going to ask to be waived and divides us from our partners at a moment when we need to be together.

Lastly, I want to address one particular point that I have heard Senator Cruz make over and over and over again in defense of his proposal.

Senator Cruz says that the construction of the pipeline stopped when Congress passed the Nord Stream sanctions and didn't begin again until Joe Biden became President. I have seen that repeated in the press, and it just isn't true.

One company that was laying the pipeline backed out of the project when the 2019 sanctions bill was passed, but then guess what happened. Russia started retrofitting other ships to finish the job, and the minute they were permitted, construction began again--not when Joe Biden was President; when Donald Trump was President. The ships were ready in May of 2020, before Joe Biden was even nominated, and they started work a few months later, as soon as the Danish Government permitted them.

Now, Senator Shaheen and Senator Cruz had passed a sanctions bill with all of our support at the end of 2019. During all of 2020, while the Russians were retrofitting these ships, while they were sending them back to Danish waters, while the permitting process was happening, Donald Trump didn't enact one sanction that was permitted by Congress.

Congress passed a law at the end of 2019. In all of 2020, Donald Trump didn't enact a single sanction. This was the critical moment. This was the time in which the meat of the pipeline was being built. President Trump did nothing, and he paid no consequence for it. Do you know why? Because in 2020, Senator Cruz didn't hold up any of Donald Trump's State Department nominees when Trump was refusing to implement sanctions, when the Russians sent ships that started showing up to restart construction, not even when construction restarted in the fall of 2020--nope. During this time, all of Trump's State Department nominees sailed through without a single Republican objection or blockade.

On Trump's last day in office, his last day, literally as he was packing up the Oval Office, January 19, he sanctioned one ship and the company that owned the ship--essentially a signal of how little he cared. On the day he was leaving, he sanctioned one ship and the company that owned the ship, but by this time, 95 percent of the pipeline was complete. It was too late. Then he begrudgingly hands over the keys to the Oval Office to Joe Biden and leaves the incoming President with a mess--a pipeline 95 percent built that Donald Trump could have stopped if he had used the sanctions he was given.

So you can understand why some of us wonder what the motivation is behind Senator Cruz's extraordinary tactics now when the pipeline is already built. It seems that the difference between 2020 and 2021 is essentially that now there is a Democrat in the White House.

This bill isn't going to help Ukraine. It is designed to hurt the President of the United States. Unfortunately, some--not all--not all but some of our Republican colleagues here have consistently put their desire to politically harm President Biden ahead of their desire to protect the Nation, holding up the confirmation of President Biden's nominees. It doesn't help the security of the Nation; it just increases the chances that the United States won't have the personnel on hand to deal with a crisis somewhere around the world when it develops and that that failure may hurt Joe Biden's approval rating. Unfortunately, I think that is what is going on here. Unfortunately, I think that is what is going on here, and I hope that my colleagues see it.

I yield the floor.

I would.

That is my understanding. My understanding is that there may have been private advocacy or public speeches given but that there certainly wasn't the tactic used that had been used during 2020, which is extraordinary, the holding of all nominees.

I think I would add to that that Democratic Senators have not used that tactic. We had huge disagreements with President Trump's policy, including his failure to use sanctions that were given to him by Congress to stop the pipeline at the moment when those sanctions would have been most effective, but we didn't block all of President Trump's Ambassadors and State Department personnel because we thought that it was better to have those people on hand, working to protect U.S. interests, than it was to have those positions vacant.

That is the case we have been trying to make on this floor, that if you really care about helping Ukraine, why did Senator Cruz spend all of 2020 blocking the Ambassadors and State Department personnel whose job it would have been to help Ukraine?

No one has been more engaged on this question and this fight than you have, Senator Shaheen.

I would.

If you don't mind, Senator Shaheen, I will just go through the timeline once again because I think it is important.

In December of 2019, Congress passed the sanctions bill that you and Senator Cruz championed. That stops Allseas, the private company, from constructing the pipeline.

They pull back, but immediately Russia starts retrofitting their own ships, and we knew it. We saw it. This wasn't secret. That happens from the beginning of 2020, and by May of 2020, those ships are on their way.

From May until October, they are caught up in permitting, but it is just a matter of time. Everybody knows those ships are eventually going to start laying down pipe.

By October of 2020, before Joe Biden is elected President, those ships are back doing construction.

In October, November, December, all throughout the end of 2020, those ships are back rebuilding the pipeline, such that on January 19, the last day of Trump's Presidency, 95 percent of the pipeline--somewhere around 95 percent of the pipeline--is done.

Then literally walking out the door, Donald Trump lays down a sanction on one company and one ship that the company owns.

All through 2020, there was no blockade of State Department nominees, no grinding to a halt of Senate nominations business to try to prompt the President to change his mind. All of that magically starts happening when Joe Biden is President, when 95 percent of the pipeline is done.

I hope, Senator Shaheen--and I will let you wrap up--I hope that we can find a way to get on the same page here because we have been for much of the last several years, and you have led that effort.

I think Senator Menendez's legislation, which is all about the right set of incentives and disincentives for Russian behavior, is perhaps the means that we can sort of elevate this above the question of who is President and get back to fighting for the interests of our Nation and the interests of our partners in Ukraine.

Mr. President, I wish it were the case that everyone agrees that what happened here on January 6 was an abomination, but that is simply not true. That is simply not true. Many of my Republican colleagues will say the right things on the Senate floor--occasionally will whisper the right things to us when the cameras aren't watching. But a recent poll--a nonpartisan Monmouth University poll--asked Republican voters whether or not they thought January 6 was a legitimate protest. And guess what. Half of Republican voters in this country say that the invasion of this Capitol that involved chants for the death of the Vice President, a gallows outside the U.S. Capitol-- half of Republicans believe that that was a legitimate protest. Seven out of ten Republicans today don't believe that Joe Biden is the legitimate President. They believe that Donald Trump won the election, despite the fact that he lost by 7 million votes.

And the reason for that is mostly that the leader of the Republican Party, Donald Trump, has been legitimizing violence, urged those protests and that insurrection attempt, cheered them at the end of the day on January 6, and also because we have seen mostly silence from mainstream Republicans who know better but don't want to pick a fight with President Trump.

So, yes, we are worried about the future of our Republic. We are worried about the future of our Republic because a mainstream political party has gotten behind the idea that power matters more than elections; that violence is a legitimate means of protest.

So this idea that everybody agrees that January 6 was an abomination just isn't true. It is not true, and that is, in part, why we are so worried.

Mr. President, I want to talk about two subjects today, and the first is this question of the rules of the Senate because I have listened with great interest over the last few days as my Republican colleagues have come down to the floor to extol the virtues of Senate tradition. They explained the danger of changing the rules so that the majority vote in the Senate can pass legislation.

It doesn't sound like a radical idea; that if the majority of Senators want a piece of legislation to pass, it should pass. But this idea that the filibuster is part of the original design of our democracy or our Senate or that the current use of the filibuster is consistent with Senate tradition is just not true.

Our Founding Fathers--yes, they built a system of government that was designed to make rapid change, even change supported by the majority of voters, really, really hard to implement.

They designed two different legislative Chambers, the President with veto power, staggered terms for Senators, but our Founding Fathers considered a supermajority requirement for legislation in the Congress, and they rejected it as too great a limitation on the will of the people.

Now, admittedly, at the time of our founding, there were other checks on the voters' will being quickly transformed into policy changes. Back then, for instance, only White men could vote. The citizenry at the time wasn't even trusted to directly elect the Members of this body. But in the decades that followed, the American people demanded more democracy, and they got it.

Why? Because as our grand experiment of democracy continues, we saw proof of concept. The people could be trusted to govern themselves. They could choose leaders who were more able, more honest, more effective than any King or Queen or Sultan or Emperor.

So we extended the franchise universally. We decided to have the Senate be directly elected, and as America expanded, the new States out in the West, they gobbled up even more democracy. The West decided to elect not just legislators but judges and prosecutors, dog catchers and insurance commissioners. The majoritarian rule, as America grew, became addictive, and as our country grew, our citizens demanded more of it.

Now, in the context of the Founders' intentions and the long-term trend toward more democracy, this 60-vote requirement, this supermajority requirement in the Senate, which doesn't exist in any other high-income democracy--it stands out like a sore, rotting thumb. This anti-majoritarian drain clog is designed intentionally to stop the majority of Americans from getting what they want from government because that is what it is.

Why should it not be up to the voters and not politicians to decide the laws of this Nation?

With a 60-vote threshold, that decision is robbed from voters. Given that only one-third of the Senate is up for election every 2 years, it is just impossible for voters on their own to move one party from, say, 46 or 48 Members of this body to 60 Members in one election, and we all know this.

But right now the American public is in no mood for the choices of elites to be continually substituted for their collective judgment. Right now, Americans are in a pretty revolutionary mood, and you can understand why. More Americans today than at any time in recent history see themselves

on the precipice of financial and spiritual ruin. So why on Earth would our message amidst this growing populous tempest be to tell voters that rules are required to protect them from their bad judgment, to take from them purposely the ability to change policies whenever and however they wish?

Now, Senate Republicans will say that even though the filibuster is anti-majoritarian--right, it is. It says that even if the public installs a majority in the Senate that wants policy A, the rules are going to be constructed in the Senate to prevent it from happening. Senate Republicans will say that even though it is anti-majoritarian, it is for good reason because, as I have heard many of my colleagues say, it promotes compromise.

Well, I have been in the Senate now for 8, 9 years. Once in a blue Moon, like this summer on the infrastructure bill, there is a big bipartisan achievement. But anyone who believes that the rules of the Senate right now incentivizes bipartisanship should just watch the Senate for, like, a few days.

Today, the 60-vote threshold just allows the minority to sit back and say, no, no, no, over and over again, in large part, because its usage has changed so much. It didn't used to be that the filibuster, the 60- vote threshold, was applied to everything.

Up until the 1970s, cloture votes were almost nonexistent in the Senate. Big things routinely passed with 50 votes. Think about this. In 1994, Senator Feinstein forced a vote here on one of the most controversial topics that we could talk about--a ban on assault weapons. It received, in 1994, fewer votes than did the Manchin-Toomey background checks bill 30 years later. But the assault weapons ban, arguably way more controversial than the background checks bill, passed and became law while the background checks bill didn't. Why? Because in 1994, many important votes, even the assault weapons ban, were allowed to proceed on a majority-vote basis.

That all changed, mostly when Democrats won the Senate in 2007, and Barack Obama was elected President. But no matter who started this policy of applying the 60-vote threshold to everything, today both parties use it. Democrats used it when we were in the minority.

The practice of the filibuster doesn't jibe with this clarion call of adhering to Senate tradition because Senate tradition is not to use the 60-vote threshold on everything. Let's be honest. We are not going back to a world in which Senators self-regulate the filibuster. And there is no sign that the claim the filibuster is an incentive for bipartisanship is going to suddenly become true.

Today, millions of voters are wondering why they vote to change the people who get elected but then nothing actually changes.

We should have a better answer than just Senate tradition.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate vote on confirmation of the Bose nomination at a time to be determined by the majority leader in consultation with the Republican leader.

Madam President, why January 6? Why were thousands of Trump supporters here in Washington on that specific date, January 6? They were here on January 6 because that was the last possible day that Donald Trump and his followers could overturn the election in which Joe Biden had just beaten the sitting President soundly--81 million votes to 74 million votes. The gap in the electoral college was much bigger on a percentage basis, 306 to 232.

But Trump and his followers decided that they were not going to just give up power just because their candidate lost an election. And their decision to put power ahead of the rule of law is, frankly, totally understandable.

Over the course of human existence, thousands of second-place finishers, either through election or by the dynamics of power succession, have refused to bend to the rules.

Most recently, Russia briefly flirted with democracy until Vladimir Putin and his cronies rigged the rules to set him up in power permanently. And throughout history, many slighted Princes or Generals have just chosen to seize power, through force or coercion, if they couldn't get it through the standing rules. Wanting power and willing to do anything to get power is as old as civilization. And that is why all those people broke into the Capitol a year ago tomorrow. They were called to Washington by President Trump to pressure Congress and State legislators and Vice President Pence to suspend the rules of succession, void the election, and install Donald Trump as President, even though he lost. Let's not pretend that anything else happened that day.

Senators Cruz and Hawley and many, many other Republicans were, on January 6, trying to get Congress to delay the certification of electors to give Trump more time to overturn the will of the voters. The rioters came to the Capitol to use violence as a last resort to try to pressure Congress to adopt the Cruz-Hawley plan. They stormed the building, and many of them were explicit when they were here that day, that they were inside the building to support President Trump, to support Senator Cruz. By the end of the day, dozens were killed or badly injured.

It wasn't a spontaneous random act of mass violence. It was a coordinated attempt to use violence, or at least the threat of violence for many, to void the 2020 election and install Donald Trump as an unelected leader of the United States of America.

History has seen this play a million times before.

But I think here in the Senate, we often get lulled into a little bit of a sense of complacency because the last vestiges of the pre-Trump era of the Republican Party still exist here in the Senate. In the Senate, only seven Republicans voted for Senators Cruz and Hawley's attempt to void Joe Biden's victory. And Senator McConnell and some others here said the right thing that day and the days afterward.

Behind closed doors, many of our veteran Republican colleagues often whispered to us how awful and vulgar the Trump rioters are and how dearly they support the rule of law. But almost never do those Republican colleagues say those things out loud because the new mainstream of the Republican Party--the Trump Republican Party--does not believe that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Pick your conspiracy theory, but 7 out of 10 Republicans--literally, tens of thousands of Americans--believe that somehow Pakistani intelligence operatives or Italian satellites or Venezuelan communists were involved in secretly switching millions of votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.

But maybe more importantly, what leads these Republicans to believe these wild conspiracy theories is a more insidious belief, a belief that if a Democrat wins an election, it must be, by definition, illegitimate. That is why this many Republicans believed Joe Biden didn't win, even though they have zero evidence to back up this claim. They don't need evidence because they just believe the Democrats are evil, that Democrats are illegitimate in governance. And if Democrats win, it just cannot be allowed to stand. Defeating Democrats is, to the Trump Republican Party, more important than maintaining democracy.

We know this because some of the most popular and revered national Republicans are calling openly for the suspension of democracy if democracy

keeps electing Democrats. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene called for States with Republican Governors to disallow people from voting if they showed an inclination to support Democrats. Our colleague, Senator Rand Paul, said efforts to convince people to vote--if those votes resulted in Democrats winning--should be illegal.

Sensible Senate Republicans--the ones who whisper the sensible things quietly to us here on the floor of the Senate Chamber--will claim that Marjorie Taylor Greene is an outlier, a fringe character, but she is exactly the opposite. She is the mainstream. She doesn't believe Joe Biden won the 2020 election, just like 7 out of 10 Republican voters. The fact that she is willing to say the quiet things out loud, it doesn't make her fringe; it makes her royalty. The best attended Republican event in my State since the 2020 election was an event headlined by Marjorie Taylor Greene.

She and Rand Paul and their ilk are the Republican Party right now. They are the healthy trunk of the tree. Sensible Senate Republicans who believe Joe Biden is a legitimate President are the dead limbs, bound to fall off soon in a slight wind.

The mainstream of today's Republican Party believes that beating Joe Biden and other Democrats is just more important than preserving democracy. So that is why they are methodically working to clean up their mistakes from 2020. They couldn't declare Joe Biden's win illegitimate because they just weren't ready on January 6. That is what January 6 was about, an attempt to postpone the certification of electors so they could get ready.

Well, in 2022 and 2024, they are going to be ready. At the heart of this plan is an attempt to just make it a whole lot harder for Democrats to vote by eliminating voting sites in Democratic neighborhoods or eliminating days to vote--days that typically Democrats vote on.

But Republicans are also preparing a secret weapon--a backup plan--if on election night, their attempts to depress Democratic turnout don't work out and a Democratic candidate for Governor or Senate or President still wins. And this backup plan is all about changing who counts the votes. It used to be that even in Republican-majority States, Democrats had a role in counting the votes, either through bipartisan panels or through the ability for cities and counties to choose their own election officials, which often meant that in Democratic counties you had Democrats in charge of counting votes and in Republican counties you had Republicans in charge of counting votes. This has been a longstanding foundation of our democracy, making sure that no one party had the monopoly on vote counting.

If both parties are engaged in the process, there is a lot more incentive for both sides to play it safe and play it straight--but no more. In Republican-controlled State after State, the rules are being changed to put Republicans and only Republicans in charge of counting the votes and, more consequently, deciding which votes count.

Trump and his followers are making sure that only Republicans who are 100 percent loyal to Trump will be the chosen few Republicans in charge of vote counting.

Everybody has heard that phone call from 2020 in which President Trump personally lobbies the Georgia secretary of state to disqualify just enough Democratic votes in order to shift the State's electors to Trump. ``I just want to find 11,780 votes,'' Trump pleads in that phone call. During that hour-long call, he makes it exactly clear what he wants. He wants 11,780 or more Democratic votes to be disqualified through vague made-up claims of fraud in order to flip the election. He tells you exactly what he wants on that phone call: votes to be disqualified on zero basis of fraud in order to flip the election to him.

The new State laws and the purge of straight shooters like the Georgia secretary of state from the party will make sure that in 2022 or 2024, if an election is close enough to flip to Republicans, the obstacles that were in place in 2020 will be gone.

Now, I know that every Republican Senator, and even a few Democratic Senators, think this scenario that I just outlined is hyperbolic. They think it is a scare tactic. But why would you think that? Trump and his allies aren't even trying to hide what they did or what they are doing. Trump lost the election. He lost the election by 7 million votes, and he didn't care. He did everything in his power, including using violence, to try to stay in power, despite the fact that he lost. Since then, he has cheerled all these changes in State laws.

Do any of you really think that he is doing this because he believes in good governance or clean elections? Of course, not. He has told you in words, in deeds, over and over, what his goal is, and his goal is to achieve power, whether or not he actually wins the election. He is not hiding it. His supporters, leaders of the Republican Party, are now openly calling for States to strip from Democrats, and Democrats only, the right to vote or the right to campaign for election.

This is all happening in front of your eyes, out in the open, right now. And only we--the 100 of us--have the ability to stop this. January 6 was just a preview. It was what happens because Trump and his minions hadn't done the necessary planning ahead to steal the election. They panicked, and they brought violence upon this building.

They may not need a physical rebellion in 2022 or 2024 because they will have changed the rules to make sure that Republicans loyal to Trump are installed in power, regardless of whether they win or lose the election.

None of us are helpless here in the U.S. Senate. We can pass laws that take away from States the power to disenfranchise any voters or the ability to put only one party in charge of vote counting.

A few of my Democratic Senate colleagues think that they are saving the Senate by preserving Republicans' right to stop these reforms. They are wrong. If we don't take steps right now to stop Trump's plan, there won't be a Senate left to protect. That is not hyperbole. If the loser of an election for the U.S. Senate gets seated as a Member of this body in 2023, then our democracy is effectively dead.

It is time we started actually listening to what Trump Republicans are telling us over and over again, out loud, that they are getting ready to do. They have made their choice, and they have chosen power over democracy.

I get it. It is always easier to do nothing and hope that the threat will just go away--just shut the door, box your ears, cover your eyes, and hope for the best. But we are the U.S. Senate. We are the ones that are put on the watch. We are the ones that are supposed to meet the threat head-on and stop it.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to legislative session and be in a period of morning business, with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each.

Mr. President, I have 2 requests for committees to meet during today's session of the Senate. They have the approval of the Majority and Minority Leaders.

Pursuant to rule XXVI, paragraph 5(a), of the Standing Rules of the Senate, the following committees are authorized to meet during today's session of the Senate:

committee on rules and administration

The Committee on Rules and Administration is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, January 5, 2022, at 9:30 a.m., to conduct a hearing.

subcommittee on housing, transportation, and community development

The Subcommittee on Housing, Transportation, and Community Development of the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, January 5, 2022, at 10 a.m., to conduct a hearing.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Con. Res. 25, which was received today.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the concurrent resolution be agreed to and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.