Floor Statements

Mr. President, when freedom and democracy are threatened, we have a responsibility in this body of the U.S. Senate to speak up and speak out. It doesn't matter if it is a challenge here at home or if it is happening somewhere else around the globe; we cannot remain silent.

For the past year, Burma has been descending into chaos, violence, and authoritarian military rule. So I have come to the floor here tonight, the anniversary of the Burmese military's illegal coup overthrowing the nation's democratically elected government, to call on all of my colleagues to join me in passing S. Res. 35, a resolution condemning this desecration of democracy in Burma and a year of atrocities that have followed, and urging our allies around the world to join us in doing so.

I also urge this body to pass the BURMA Act, which will give President Biden the tools he needs to apply pressure to try to reverse this coup and help restore democracy.

For those who are not aware of the situation in Burma, a year ago, the

people of Burma took to the streets. They engaged in general strikes to peacefully protest the military's overthrow of their fledgling democracy. One woman who was part of the General Strike Committee--one of the main groups behind the protests--said she was participating because ``I have a little girl. She's one . . . I don't want her to grow up under a dictatorship like I did.''

Before taking to the streets, she told her husband: ``Take care of our baby and move on with life if I get arrested or die in this movement.''

And she finished by saying: ``We will finish this revolution on our own and not hand it over to our children.''

Early last year, the country's Parliament was expected to sign off on the recent national elections in which the leading civilian party, the National League for Democracy, and its head, Aung San Suu Kyi, had won more than 80 percent of the seats that were available.

The Burmese military was never under civilian control, and it wasn't happy with these overwhelming results--these results for the National League for Democracy. They had been deluded into thinking and believing that the people of Burma supported their military policies, and so they would support a strong military role in Parliament, which the people of Burma did not.

Thus, the military leaders refused to recognize the outcome of the election. They tried to have the country's supreme court throw out the results as fraudulent. And when that didn't work, they declared a national emergency and surrounded Parliament with soldiers.

Aung San Suu Kyi and other civilian leaders were arrested, the nation's infrastructure was seized by the military, and, almost overnight, Burma's decade-long experiment with democracy, as imperfect as it was, was thrown out the window, and the kind of brutal military rule that had governed the country for roughly half a century was reinstated.

The initial reaction from the new military junta seemed restrained. The protests were allowed to go on peacefully, but only for a little while. The restraint didn't last long.

The military leaders who had been leading a brutal, yearlong genocide against the country's Rohingya Muslim minority turned to violence. They turned to violence, as they had done in 1988 and as they had done in 2007, to crush the protests.

One local filmmaker in Yangon, who took it upon himself to document the protests, said that at one protest in late February, ``about 100 people marched towards us quickly. I don't know if they were police or they were soldiers. Without warning, they started shooting at us with sound bombs, [with] bullets and [with] gas bombs.''

Since then, the military's violence has escalated. They have fired rocket launchers, burned down homes, launched airstrikes, cut off food supplies to starve entire communities, and shot at unarmed civilians as they fled.

Just last week, there was a report that members of the military went to one village looking for two specific individuals, one of whom was disabled. After shooting and killing these two individuals, they set fire to the entire village.

According to one organization monitoring the situation, nearly 1,500 Burmese citizens have been killed since this coup began a year ago; another 12,000 arrested; with warrants issued--often death warrants issued in absentia--for another 2,000 or so. Those are just the numbers that can be verified, and who knows what the total amount is.

For the Rohingya people, a Muslim population in a largely Buddhist country, the situation has only grown worse. They have been the target of military oppression and genocide. Hundreds of thousands have fled across the border. But the military has continued to crack down even more on the Rohingya population in Rakhine State--a state I visited a few years ago, leading a delegation of Senators and House Members, after the horrific genocide, when some 700,000 people fled, villages were fire-bombed from the air, and helicopters carrying soldiers shot from the air. On the ground, babies were killed in front of their parents, wives were killed in front of their husbands, husbands were killed in front of their wives, and women were raped. It was one of the most horrific genocides in hundreds of villages that occurred at that moment.

But the military now, in spite of all that happened then, is enacting new draconian restrictions on freedom of movement of the Rohingya that remain in Rakhine State. They have engaged in continuous intimidation efforts. They have warned of the dangers of collaborating with rogue groups resisting the military's authority.

Colleagues, the Senate cannot stay quiet in the denial of freedom and the presence of massive human rights violations in Burma. America cannot stay silent in the face of such atrocities. The world must not stay silent in the face of genocide being carried out against any group of human beings.

We must make it undeniably clear to any government around the world that when you systematically persecute your people; when you deny their human rights; when you murder innocent men, women, and children; when you burn down their homes and their communities; when you starve them of food, deny them the opportunity to earn a living or even travel to the next community to see a doctor, there are consequences; that a community of nations will not stand by idly as you commit these horrendous acts; and that we in the Senate will not sit by and fail to give voice about these atrocities.

So for the sake of all the Burmese people who have lost their lives in this coup, for the sake of all those striving to restore democracy, let us pass S. Res. 35, and let us do it this week--``A resolution condemning the military coup that took place on February 1, 2021, in Burma and the Burmese military's detention of civilian leaders, calling for an immediate and unconditional release of all those detained and for those elected to serve in parliament to resume their duties without impediment.''

Let's pass that resolution, and let's do it this week, the 1-year anniversary of the coup. And let us work with our allies around the globe to restore freedom in Burma and hold the perpetrators of these atrocities accountable for the crimes that they have committed.

Mr. 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 ask unanimous consent that privileges of the floor be granted to Jeffrey Warner, my State Department fellow, for the duration of his time as a fellow.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 10 a.m. on Tuesday, February 1; 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 and resume consideration of the Brennan nomination, postcloture; further, that all postcloture time on the Brennan nomination expire at 11:30 a.m.; that the Senate recess following the cloture vote on the Fleming nomination until 2:15 p.m. to allow for the weekly caucus meetings; that if cloture is invoked on the Fleming nomination, all postcloture time expire at 2:15 p.m.; finally, if any nominations are confirmed during Tuesday's session, that 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, for the information of Senators, there will be two votes at 11:30 a.m. and two votes at 2:15 p.m., with additional rollcall votes expected.

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 Committee on Indian Affairs be discharged from further consideration and that the Senate now proceed to S. Res. 482.

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 the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. Con. Res. 28.

I ask unanimous consent that the concurrent 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 believe we are all familiar with the question: If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Well, here in the U.S. Senate, we can ask the question: If we accomplish something important but fail to communicate that to our constituents, did it actually happen?

The majority of the American people have so much on their plates that they are not following the intricate, daily workings of this Chamber, so they expect their Senators to speak to them on a regular basis about the work they are doing on their behalf.

As the author and former Presidential speechwriter James Humes has said: ``The art of communication is the language of leadership.'' That is why each and every one of us, in turn, relies on the dedicated men and women to help us communicate with folks back home.

I am here on the floor today to say farewell to a member of my team who has been so instrumental in helping me communicate to the people of Oregon.

For the past now 7\1/2\ years, Ray Zaccaro has served as my communications director. What a 7\1/2\ years it has been, especially when you consider how drastically the media and communications landscape has changed in that 7\1/2\ years. We have gone from local newspapers and cable news in serving as the dominant means of mass communication to Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Snapchat and TikTok and others that are far too numerous for me to keep track of, but that is why we have a communications team.

One day, produced video content performed the best. The next, it was suddenly selfie-style videos. Videos used to do very well on Facebook. When the algorithms changed, they didn't do so well. Then Instagram reels took off, and on and on and on. It is incredible how fast the communication world keeps changing. Since March of 2020, it has only gotten more chaotic as the pandemic has turned everything upside down, including how we consume information and how we communicate.

Ray Zaccaro expertly helped me and the entire team navigate this ever-shifting media landscape. As recording studios shut down, he mobilized the communications team to quickly transition to use a vast array of tools, including Skype and Zoom, so that we could continue to get our message and timely information to the people of Oregon.

That foresight and quick action are just extensions of his entire approach to communication--always challenging the members of our team to think outside the box and never being afraid to suggest new ideas, no matter how crazy they might initially seem. It doesn't matter if they work in communications or on the legislative team or with constituent services. He believes everyone on the team has a role to play in helping to develop and tell the story of what we are working to do. And he has proven right, time and time again, over the last 7-plus years.

When Jeff Sessions, as Attorney General under the previous administration,

gave his ``zero tolerance'' speech, I said to my team: It sounds like he is planning for a policy of tearing children out of their parents' arms down at the border, and I am sure that is hyperbole because no American administration would ever do that to children.

A member of my team said: There is one way to find out. Go down there yourself.

Well, Ray, who is sitting behind me on the bench, took that idea and ran with it. We went down there the following Sunday, down to Texas, and he used his cell phone to livestream our attempts to try and ascertain exactly what was happening to young boys and girls.

At a detention facility in McAllen, we were the first legislative team to witness that, indeed, Team Trump was ripping children out of their parents' arms. I will never forget, as Ray and I walked into that facility, there was a group of press outside who said: What are you going to find?

I said: I have no idea, but I will talk with you all when we come out.

Ray and I went in and saw those children in cages. And as we were being given a tour, I remember this group of young boys who were in one of the cages. They were being asked to line up--there were about 10 of them--from the shortest to the tallest, and the youngest was knee-high to a grasshopper. He was just maybe 4 years old.

I asked: Where did these young boys come from?

He said: Well, we brought them in that door over there, and we took them away from their parents.

And in that warehouse room, the parents were in other cyclone fence cages. And if the boys peered really hard, they might possibly see a parent or a sister, a father or mother, an uncle somewhere in that warehouse, but they had no idea what fate awaited them.

We went outside and talked to the press outside and told them what was happening. And in a flash, it was national news about what was going on by our government in their treatment of young children.

We went up the road to Brownsville. We had heard that there were a few hundred boys possibly being held in a former Walmart. I thought that was an astounding story, not possibly true, but should we go and check it out? Ray and I decided we would.

We went up to this former Walmart. It had barriers to keep you from parking in the former Walmart parking lot so we walked across the grounds to the door, where, by cell phone, I called up the number that was inside and said: We are here. I am a U.S. Senator, and we would like to have a tour, please, of your facility, if we could speak with your manager or your manager could come out and talk with us. Eventually, the manager did come out. His assistant had said he would be talking to us, but, actually, what he did was he called the police. And he didn't come out until the police cars were arriving.

I think Ray, who was livestreaming the whole thing, secretly wanted me to be arrested and carried off in handcuffs to magnify the impact of the story. I am sorry, Ray, that it didn't come to that, but the story had a tremendous impact.

They would not let me into that Walmart to see what was going on, but the national scandal that ensued in the days that followed meant the press of the United States of America got in the following weekend, and a national debate started about who are we as citizens of the United States of America and who is our government and what are we doing to these children?

It turned out there were not a few hundred boys in that facility; there were a few boys short of 1,500 in that single former Walmart.

The work that Ray did that day revealed the truth of Trump's actions and shocked this Nation and moved this Nation to action. Horrified, as we continued to learn about the realities of the situation, Ray kept up the drumbeat with his contacts in the media throughout months that followed to ensure that that story of traumatized children and how we can help them continued, and those children were never forgotten.

Let me be clear. It wasn't just the power of the story or the opportunity to get his boss--me--on television; he kept up the drumbeat because he is a passionate person who cares deeply about others.

Countless members of Team Merkley could recount stories about a time when Ray went out of his way to help them, to provide comfort and support when they were going through a difficult moment in their lives, or just a call to check in on how someone is doing or a full-blown Italian feast delivered to the home of a fellow team member grieving the loss of a loved one. And as his work with those migrant children separated from their parents at the border showed, he doesn't have to know you personally to care deeply.

One time Ray was out with me in Oregon for a series of townhalls, and a constituent showed up who was having a personal crisis. Ray went out of his way to make sure that man got the help he needed, while still continuing to do the other aspects of his job: attending to members of the media, guiding and supporting staff in their respective tasks, and ensuring that the constituent had everything he needed.

That is just who he is, the type of person who will drop everything if someone needs help, who will offer up his own apartment so his boss can come film an important, last-minute video when the planned location fell through.

I couldn't begin to count how many late nights and early mornings we spent together sitting for media interviews. I am thinking right now, here on the floor of the Senate, of a night a few years ago, when I was here through the night, speaking for over 15 hours straight to protest the theft of a Supreme Court seat by our former President and then- Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Throughout the night, there was Ray, in between running back and forth to the office to take calls from reporters and producers, returning to flip floor charts as my speech proceeded.

Thank you, Ray, for all that you have done for the team, for the people of Oregon, and for the people of this Nation. Thank you for your tireless efforts to utilize communication tools at our disposal to protect our democracy and enhance the important issues that face our Nation, from healthcare to housing, to education, to living-wage jobs, to equality of opportunity, to taking on climate chaos. Thank you for bringing the passionate and longstanding commitment to democratic politics and principals that were forged in your early experiences back home in Long Island, and you brought them to Capitol Hill.

It is hard to picture what our Team Merkley experience will be after you leave because you have been such an integral part for so long. But know that while you will be deeply missed, we all wish you nothing but the best in this next chapter of your life as you continue fighting to build a better world.

Thank you.

A felony.

Would the Senator yield?

Thank you. I am struck by your comment that in all previous situations, the rules have been modified by a change in the rules that has been done through the rules process because--I would encourage you to read up on your Senate history--it is just not the case.

In fact, under Senator Byrd's leadership, nine times this Chamber changed the interpretation of existing rules, and they didn't do it through a formal rules change process. They did it with an interpretation of the Chair being sustained or by reversing the interpretation of the Chair.

And you have been here when a nuclear option modified the rules. Your party led the effort to change the requirement for closing debate on the Supreme Court. And you have been here--or I think you were here; your colleagues were here--when they changed the rule, not by changing the rule formally but by reinterpreting it through a nuclear option, in regard to decreasing the number of hours for debate on district judges.

It also goes back to the fact that your team changed the rules, without going through the formal rule process, on how reconciliation is done in order to be able to do tax cuts for the rich. And then Kent Conrad, on our side, advocated the change back, and your side, in preparation for the Trump tax cuts in 2017, changed the rule again.

So at least let us understand that both sides--Democrats and Republicans--have resorted to reinterpreting the rules on various occasions. Just a point of clarification that your statement was wrong.

Mr. President, I compliment my colleagues from Maine and Georgia for engaging in perhaps the most substantive exchange I have ever witnessed in 13 years here in the Senate.

(Applause.)

Earlier this evening, one of my colleagues from across the aisle said: Why are we going down this road? And there have been similar questions: Why is this so important? Why is this bill so important?

I will answer simply this: that dark money corrupts elections. If you and I donate more than $200 to a campaign, we record it, but if extraordinarily wealthy individuals donate hundreds of millions of dollars, they can do it with no attribution, corrupting the elections across this country.

Gerrymandering corrupts the system of equal representation. From the earliest debates in this Chamber, it was recognized that each of us has a stake in the integrity of the elections in other States so that the people of the United States experience equal representation. We do not have equal representation in the House today, and the gerrymandering going on now will increase that corruption.

Third and most importantly, the power to vote is the most significant right, guaranteeing each citizen a voice in the direction of our democracy. It is the soul of what it means to be a democratic republic. That power to vote is also the most important check in our system of checks and balances.

With rigged elections, leaders leaning toward autocracy can keep themselves in power, but with fair elections, undergirded by a free press, the people can vote out those autocratic leaders who ignore laws and undermine our institutions. It is the most important check in maintaining the integrity of our beloved Republic.

Let's go back in time. The rules of the Senate were forged in the Confederation Congress experience. Our Founders were engaged, during the time they were writing our Constitution, in participating in the Confederation Congress that required a vote of 9 out of 13--two-thirds plus a bit--in order to pass any law. It prevented them from being able to pay the pensions of our veterans, and it prevented them from raising money for Shays' Rebellion.

Our Founders who participated in that process said: This supermajority has paralyzed our ability to act. With that in mind, they wrote our Constitution so that legislation would be passed by a simple majority; that at the end of the debate, when all perspectives were duly considered, the perspective favored by the larger number would be accepted rather than the perspective favored by the smaller number.

So our Founders, leaving nothing to chance, warned us in their writings: Never adopt a supermajority.

They said--and I will quote James Madison--that when ``the general good might require new laws . . . the principle of free government would be reversed. It would be no longer the majority that would rule: [It would be] the power transferred to the minority.'' He went on to say the result would be ``particular emergencies, to extort unreasonable indulgences.''

Hamilton said many similar things. ``If a pertinacious minority can control the opinion of the majority,'' the result will be ``tedious delays; continual negotiation and intrigue; contemptible . . . compromises.'' He noted that the ``[supermajority's] real operation is to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the government.'' Anyone who has seen the energy drained out of this Chamber by nothing happening day after day after day when we have important issues to face can understand just how right the Founders were.

So in writing up the guidelines and the vision for the initial Senate, our leaders came up with a Senate code, and that Senate code was, hear all perspectives--in fact, guaranteeing in rule IV of the original rules that every Senator would have the right to speak twice to a question.

In addition, they put into the rules a previous question just in case they couldn't get the debate to wrap up so they could get to that all- important vote to determine where the greater number stood.

Thomas Jefferson put into the rule book, the manual for the rules in 1801: ``No one is to speak impertinently or beside the question, superfluously or tediously.''

Hear the debate, consider all perspectives, and take the option the greater number favored.

That Senate code endured in a powerful fashion for a very long time. In 1806, Aaron Burr was rewriting the rules, and he said: You know, we have never needed to use the previous question rule in the book because we hear every one, we hear those perspectives, we take a vote, and we go forward. So we don't need the previous question. And it was dropped from the rule book.

When I hear the folks say the Senate never had a simple majority to close debate--they had the Senate code, and they had a rule, and then they said: We don't need the rule because we have the Senate code.

That code continued to endure, and the full understanding of the Members of this Chamber was they had no right to prevent the Senate from getting to a final vote.

That code was so powerful that in the mid-1800s, when Senators started to speak at length in order to make it very difficult to get to a final vote, the press called it piracy.

You may wonder, where did the term ``filibuster'' come from? That term is a corruption of the term ``freebooter,'' the term for ``piracy.'' The piracy was Senators breaking the Senate code. That was the piracy. But, still, it happened on rare occasion, and the code was stretched but not really broken through the 1800s, except on civil rights.

What happened in our history on civil rights? Well, you had John C. Calhoun leading the nullification movement that said: Hey, States don't have to accept any given Federal law. They can choose and pick which ones they want.

Initially, that nullification movement was in order to block laws that put tariffs on imported products that strengthened the North and cost more funds to the South, increased the prices of goods, but then it turned to the question of protecting slavery. Nullification continued and even went so far as to say States should have the right to secede if they don't like those Federal laws. Then we had a civil war over that question, and that was the end of nullification, but it was not the end of attacks on civil rights.

So what did we see after the Civil War? We saw a group of States make it harder for individuals to register to vote. We saw a group of States make it hard for Black Americans to get public accommodations. We saw a group of States make it easier to reenslave Black Americans under the Black code, utilizing the slavery clause of the 13th Amendment.

Congress responded, the House responded, this Senate responded and said: No. We are here to defend the Constitution, that every person is created equal, and every person's rights must be protected.

That is what this Chamber, the Senate, did in 1875.

The House passed the Civil Rights Act on public accommodations, guaranteeing access to all public accommodations for all Americans. The House voted 152 to 99. It came to the Senate, and the Senate voted 38 to 26, a simple majority.

Although there were Senators here who desperately hated public accommodation bills because it would end discrimination in the South, they did not filibuster because the Senate code said that after all views are heard, you can hold a simple majority vote.

The Senate code held, but it didn't hold in 1891. In 1890, Henry Cabot Lodge, down the hall in the House, introduced what became known as the Lodge bill. It said: In order to protect the foundation of our Nation, there can be Federal supervision upon request to make sure registration is fair, to make sure the voting process is fair, and to make sure the counting process is fair.

The bill came here to the Senate, and a bipartisan group filibustered that bill, southern Democrats and western Senators known as the Silver Senators. They were anxious to get onto a bill about silver coinage to support the silver mining in the West. That bill was eventually tabled.

In 1891, the Senate code was broken on civil rights and continued to be broken through 1965. In 1922, the Dyer Anti-Lynching Act was filibustered. In 1934, the Costigan-Wagner anti-lynching act was filibustered. In 1942, the anti-poll tax bill that put a price on being able to access the ballot box--it was filibustered. And on and on.

With the exception of a 1-week delay in a bill for arming commercial ships in 1917, virtually every filibuster denied Black Americans the right to vote because in lieu of nullification, there had to be a strategy for certain Senators to make sure that Black Americans didn't get their civil rights. That is the sorry chapter of that part of our American history. Three generations through it, 1965 paid the price of denying opportunities.

The Senate code on every other issue essentially survived until 1971, within our lifetimes. In 1971, we started to see the filibuster go to not just 1 or 2 filibusters a year but to 12, a dozen--imagine that-- and in 1974 to 32. That was just so outrageous because each one takes up a week, and so this Senate said: That is unacceptable, so we must reform the rules. It led to the March 1975 rule reform where they went from two-thirds of those voting to 60 Members voting.

Well, the result is, that law backfired. To quickly look at it, cloture on amendments--each one taking up a week--expanded from some 6 times in the entire decade of the 1960s to 143 times in the 2010s.

For a motion to proceed, which is the ability to prevent debate from ever happening--the filibuster to promote debate was used to kill debate on the motion to proceed. It was used 10 times in the 1960s and 175 times in the 2010s. And, on nominations, it went from once in the 1960s to 545 times in the 2010s.

How did it happen that it expanded in the 2010s? Well, it happened because a Republican minority decided that they were going to obstruct as many of President Obama's nominations as possible. And the Democrats did the same thing to President Trump.

Each one of these takes up a week, an intervening day, 30 hours of debate, another hour of debate for every other Senator who wants to speak who didn't get to--every single one. So when you have over 100 of these a year, it is impossible to have a Senate that works. The Senate has been broken.

And perhaps the top champion of breaking the Senate is the minority leader, who has engaged in the tactic of delay and obstruction, arguing he wanted to make sure--his top priority was making sure President Obama was never reelected, and stopping him from having an agenda and stopping him from putting people into office was the strategy. And Democrats took much the same approach to President Trump. So we have both done it, but the Senate is blown up now.

In that original Congress, the Senate, the first term, it said there were about four Cabinet members to confirm, plus Ambassadors and some judges--four. We have over a thousand positions now. It is completely out of sync. The gears don't match.

And every time there is a filibuster on a nomination, it is another week lost. So the Senate is now paralyzed because here is the interesting prospect and the unfortunate reality of 60 votes. The interesting prospect is that a majority of less than 60 has to reach out to the minority to get something done. And that sounds like it is going to increase cooperation and negotiation, but the unfortunate reality, in our tribal, partisan politics, is the minority looks at that and says: If we can hold 41 Senators from agreeing to close debate, we can paralyze the majority. The overwhelming impact is paralysis and accentuation of partisanship of our current filibuster.

Today's debate, it is not about filibuster versus no filibuster; it is about fixing a broken Senate. It is about the difference, as my colleague from Virginia has said, from the secret, no-show filibuster to the public, talking filibuster.

Before 1975, people who wanted to extend debate had to actually debate. What a notion. They had to show up. And that is painful and difficult to maintain continuous debate, and so there is an incentive to negotiate. But when there is a no-show, no-effort filibuster, where those who say they want to debate are off on vacation because 60 votes is required with or without them, there is no incentive to negotiate.

So if you believe the Senate should be a place that encourages negotiation, we need a public filibuster, not a secret, silent filibuster. If you believe that the public should be able to participate in our process, we need not a secret, silent filibuster but a public, talking filibuster. We are here, day after day, week after week. We are debating the issue. We are raising amendments. We are considering amendments. And what is the result? The citizens weigh in. They say: Finally, they are considering it. Finally, they are debating it. Finally, they are going to take a vote. Now we can weigh in effectively in this moment.

So this is about restoring, reinvigorating debate, restoring the public role, creating an incentive to negotiate, creating an incentive for both sides to work to reach an accommodation.

Now, my Republican friends have made much today of Democrats signing a letter saying that they are determined to ``preserve the ability of Members to engage in extended debate''--interesting--``preserve the ability of Members to engage in extended debate.'' To preserve the ability to engage in extended debate means we need the talking, public filibuster, not the secret, silent filibuster which requires no debate at all. So, to my Republican colleagues who signed this letter, this is your opportunity to do what you said. Vote for the principle that the majority leader is going to be laying out forthwith.

So, colleagues, if you believe in the Founders' vision of this Senate, of hearing everyone and hearing everyone well but eventually getting to a final bill; if you believe in the Senate code, which stood up for so long, not even needing a rule to enforce it, except for civil rights it held up through 1971; if you want more debate and you want people who want a debate to have to show up to debate, support the talking filibuster.

If you believe there should be an incentive for both the majority and minority to negotiate, support the talking filibuster. If you believe the public should have the ability to see us debating issues, then support the talking filibuster.

My colleagues have said: We must defend the minority leverage. Amen to that. That is why, in 2011, I put forward in this Chamber the talking filibuster and said we need to defend the minority's right to participate.

Today, we have another opportunity to defend the minority's participation, to speak at length for at least twice on any given question, on through a complex bill. But that, colleagues, depends upon ending the era of the secret, silent source of partisanship and paralysis that we currently have and replacing it with the talking, public filibuster.

I encourage you all to stand today for the Senate to work and for the Senate, most importantly, to defend the fundamental rights of every American to access the ballot box.

To my colleague from West Virginia, the challenge that we have today is that, in the course of Senate debate, it is never possible to get to a debate on the final question. And the proposal that the majority leader is putting forward is saying it is time to get to that final debate, and on that final debate every Senator can speak twice.

I can tell you, leadership on both sides probably is nervous about the idea of 100 Senators speaking twice, at length, but the single innovation of the talking filibuster is to say that there will be a period of debate in which we will consider final passage with all four of the mechanisms that currently exist, three that were created at the foundation--and that is the break in debate and that is the two-speech rule and that is unanimous consent and the 60 votes that was created in 1975.

The vision, the vision of this----

Excuse me. Go ahead.

What we are voting on now is to go to final passage with continuous debate, and the majority leader's team has crafted this to ensure continuous debate.

That would be--had we gotten to the bill and been able to engage in----

To my colleague from West Virginia, your question is, What are the characteristics that define continuous debate on final passage? And it is defined as without interruptions that take us in other directions than the question of final passage of the bill.

Would the Senator from Iowa yield for a question?

Thank you very much.

First, thank you for coming to the floor to debate such an important issue as how to make the Senate work well as a deliberative body and how to make our country work well.

I was struck by a couple of things that you mentioned, and that is that you had stood strong fast against striking down the filibuster, and you noted how consistent you were. But you also criticized Democrats for changing position.

But can you help my memory out on this, because did you not vote to strike down the filibuster on Supreme Court nominations?

So you changed your position, as well you would concede, since previously you had opposed getting rid of the filibuster?

I do appreciate your response, and it is so rare that we actually have any dialogue on the floor of the Senate. It is one of the things we lost.

I do recall in that moment that, for over a year, we had working groups trying to resolve the extraordinary level--the new level--of cloture motions on President Obama's nominations. It concluded in a meeting in the Old Senate Chamber where the agreement was reached to stop doing that. And then, as you point out, Mitch McConnell came to the floor and said: It doesn't matter the quality of the individual who is nominated. I will not let any judge be considered for these three vacancies.

That is a completely unprecedented new element that is brought in to bear on that particular conversation. That is just to, kind of, illuminate some of the details that were left out.

I was struck by another thing you said, which is that the filibuster is not a relic of Jim Crow. I was struck about that because from 1891 through 1965--so we are talking over 80 years--the only thing that was blocked in the U.S. Senate by filibuster was civil rights for Black Americans. Given that, wouldn't you say it is fair for us to say that the filibuster in that history was, indeed, a relic of Jim Crow?

Thank you for answering and responding to my questions. I appreciate that.

Mr. President, I think I will start just by returning to the 1800s and a Senator from Massachusetts, Senator Sumner. Senator Sumner later played a key role in the civil rights debate, which is why I am returning to that story. I think it is a story about the Senate floor.

Sumner gave a speech about Kansas being admitted into the Union, and he was a Republican Senator who called out two Democratic Senators, insulting one of them. And a Representative from the House of Representatives, on the other end of this corridor, came over here. His name was Preston Brooks, and he took considerable offense, and he proceeded to come to the Senate floor and cane Senator Sumner. Senator Sumner was gravely injured, but he did recover--recovering slowly. He served for another 18 years, which leads me to the fact that he proceeded to put forward civil rights legislation in 1875--in 1875--150 years ago--almost 150 years ago, 145 years ago.

And so he argued after the Civil War that our Black Americans were being discriminated against and it needed to end; that anyone should go into any public accommodation and be treated equally here in the United States of America--a Constitution that says: All men--and let's include women--are created equally.

So he put forward this bill, and it said that every person gets equal access to theaters, to public schools, to churches, to cemeteries, equal opportunity to serve in jury duty, and that any suits brought in this regard would be tried in Federal court, not State court, so we could enforce a Federal standard of nondiscrimination across this land.

Sumner died of a heart attack in 1874. He had put forward this originally as an amendment--actually, an introduction in 1870, as a bill. He died before it could be passed. As he was dying, he pleaded with Frederick Douglass and others at his bedside: You must take care of my civil rights bill.

In the months following his death, the Senate did act, and they supported that bill, and it was passed into law in 1875. At that moment, it would be hard to envision that, after I was born, we would still be fighting for equal access to public accommodations. The Senate passed that bill and made it into law in 1875. But the Supreme Court of the United States struck down that law 8 years later. Boom--equal access in America supported by the elected Representatives in the House and the Senate was blown to smithereens by a Supreme Court of the United States of America.

Well, that did set the stage for another civil rights battle, and it was 1890. It was after Benjamin Harrison's successful Presidential campaign, in which he promised election reform and election integrity because, you see, anyone looking at our Republic would know that we are all affected, no matter what State we come from, by the integrity of the elections in the other States. There has to be integrity in all of them for this U.S. Senate to have integrity. There has to be integrity in all of the State elections for that House of Representatives down the hall to have integrity.

So Benjamin Harrison was elected campaigning on this type of reform. And there was a Senator, Senator George Hoar, who championed amendments or an attempt to bolster national protections for Federal elections. It was particularly targeted at stopping voter suppression that had really arisen in the southern part of the United States following the Civil War. So this bill, known commonly as the Lodge bill, also known as the federal elections bill, passed the House of Representatives in 1890.

What did this bill do? It allowed citizens from any district to petition a Federal circuit court to appoint Federal supervisors for congressional elections in case of efforts to suppress the vote by local officials. It permitted the Federal Government to appoint supervisors to oversee all phases of Federal elections, including voter registration and the certification of the election results to make sure there were no shenanigans at the State level that would corrupt the core vision of equal representation, the core foundation of integrity of elections. It is the foundation of the vision of the legitimacy and the production of government of, by, and for the people.

And this bill even enabled Federal election supervisors to request deputy U.S. marshals, as necessary, to protect the ballot box for every citizen to have access. It passed the House of Representatives, and it came here to the Senate, and it failed because they couldn't get unanimous consent to close debate. At that time, there was no cloture motion.

The Senators, in 1805, had gotten rid of the prior question rule, which would have allowed debate to be closed because they had a social contract. That social contract was that we listen to everyone to get their perspectives. People can speak, not once, but twice on a question. They can speak for as long we wanted to listen to everyone and then we take a vote. That was the social contract.

But this filibuster broke that social contract because everyone was listened to, but you couldn't get unanimous consent to close debate and so the bill died. It had the support of the people of the United States of America through their elected representatives down the hall. It had the support of this Senate to protect the fundamental right to vote in our Nation by the majority of this body here in the U.S. Senate. But the social contract was broken to block Black Americans from voting; to allow States and local election officials to rig the registration system so you could never sign up; to allow intimidators to gather at the polls to keep Black Americans from getting through them to put their ballot in the box.

I would like to say that all traces of inequality in voting are gone from America. I would like to say that. And, indeed, that was reasonably true--reasonably true--through the recent years, before the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, because any changes in your voting rules had to be preapproved in States that engaged in these intimidating practice. I say ``reasonably true'' because the real fact is there was still a significant blemish in our elections, and that is, on election day, in certain States and certain precincts, there was a game being played to make it harder for some citizens to vote than other citizens to vote.

The game worked like this: If you have an area where you want low turnout, you proceed to create a big precinct so that there are a lot of people who have to go to that one place to vote. And if you have a desire to encourage the people in another precinct to vote, a White precinct, you create smaller precincts so the voting line won't be as long.

And then there were other tricks like, for example, understaffing the voting precinct where it is predominantly Black Americans to make it harder for them to vote and making sure you staff really well the precinct where you want the White Americans to vote.

And there were other tricks, as well. For example, relocating the voting location in the Black precinct so that people go to the wrong place, or putting it where parking is virtually impossible so it is much harder to get to the poll, or putting out false information about the date and the location of the voting.

These things are all wrong. Voter suppression exists today. And it was powerful to see how a couple tools have greatly reduced those tricks and traps.

One of those tools is early voting. If you have an early voting period, it is hard to create long lines. It is hard to sustain wrong information about where to go. It is very difficult to deny people the ability to vote simply by having too few staffers.

Even more so, vote-by-mail is powerful. Now, we have Republican States like Utah that have vote-by-mail, and they love it. And it elects Republicans. You have more blue States like Oregon that have vote-by-mail, and they love it. That is my home State.

I was really struck, when I was first running for the Oregon State Legislature--it was 1998, and we still voted at the precincts' voting polls, except the Republican Party had said: We can increase turnout if we get all the Republicans to sign up for absentee ballots. So they got a high percentage of Republicans to sign up for absentee ballots. Then the Democrats said: Well, OK, yes, we can get Democrats to sign up for absentee ballots. So 50 percent of the electorate in 1998 in Oregon was voting by mail and 50 percent, polls.

As I went door to door in my first race for the Oregon House and asked people what they liked and didn't like, they normally said: What I really hate is that we have too many potholes, and I am not happy with city hall. What I really like is my absentee ballot.

I would say: Well, why is that?

They would say: Well, you know, I don't have to worry about where to park, and I don't have to worry about long lines. Do you know what else? It is a complicated set of issues under the initiative system we have in Oregon, and I can be able to sit at my table, study them, discuss them with my spouse, and have my children come to the table and see what we are doing.

Well, these two tools really opened the doors to the election process in the last election, and the response of my Republican colleagues was: Oh, no, we can't let that happen. We don't want those people to vote. We better rein in vote-by-mail. We better rein in voter registration.

Georgia got rid of voter registration in between the main election and the

runoff because 70,000-plus Georgians registered in that period, and they think it helped Democrats more than Republicans. So, in a prejudicial way, they said: Let's make registration harder.

Well, it is not acceptable in our country to erect barriers for targeted communities--not for Black Americans, not for Hispanic Americans, not for college students, not for young voters, and not for Native American reservations--not for anyone.

But why are those groups being targeted in a surgical way by the strategies in State after State after State with Republican legislatures and Republican Governors? Because those constituencies tend to vote more often for Democrats than Republicans. So they are stealing the vote of millions of Americans. They are corrupting the election process for millions of Americans.

We stand here today in the Senate with the same issue we were debating in 1890 and 1891. The House had set national standards so every American could vote, and the Senate would not give unanimous consent to get to a final vote and contributed to eight-plus decades of discrimination in our country, of corrupted elections in our country-- until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

I see a colleague here preparing to speak, and I haven't even begun my real speech yet. I am going to close to hand the floor to him, my colleague from Maryland, but let me summarize a couple points before I do so.

I believe the Senate is far better off when the minority has the power to slow things down. I think that is value, to be able to have leverage to get amendments; to be able to negotiate a compromise; to be able to make sure a technical bill has been examined by experts and you understand what it really does; to make sure we have seen all the provisions; to make sure the public has seen all the provisions; to make sure the press has been able to investigate the provisions. All of that is incredibly positive, and it is why, whether I have been in the minority or been in the majority, I have argued we need to sustain 60 votes to close debate, and I still hold that position now--60 votes to close debate by a vote.

There have traditionally been four ways that a debate on the floor comes to a conclusion.

The first is a break in the debate. At that point, I was struck when I asked the experts ``Is the Chair allowed to call the question?'' and I was told that not only can they call the question, they have a responsibility to call the question when there is a break in the debate. So a break in the debate is one.

The second is by unanimous consent. Everyone agrees we have been at this long enough. Let's do four more amendments and then go to final passage, and there is a unanimous consent agreement to do that. We still do that quite often.

The third is to have a vote on closing debate, and we have to get 60 votes. It is not a ratio of those who show up to vote. So the irony is, those who want a debate often don't show up. You can have a vote 59 to 5, and the 59 lose. You have to get 60 votes.

The fourth is rule XIX, which says every Senator gets to speak twice. Now, as far as I am aware, there has never been a debate in the U.S. Senate that was finally brought to a close by everyone using up their two speeches, but it always hovers there, saying there is an eventual ability to vote on the question.

These are the four traditional strategies. We need to apply those four strategies to a period of debate addressing final passage of the bill. The cloture motion would still be there. The possibility of a UC would still be there. A break in the debate would still be a break in the debate, and a UC would be a UC. All four tools would still be there, but we would be addressing final passage.

The problem we have--a little kind of behind-the-scenes complexity of Senate rules--is that in the modern Senate, there is always a pending amendment. So you can't actually get to final passage unless you have a period of debate dedicated to final passage, and breaking the debate would call the question on the amendment, not final passage.

This means that those who want more debate could hold the floor for weeks and weeks on something they are determined to keep presenting to the American public, but it brings in the public. It brings in the public. They can weigh in on whether we are heroes or whether we are bums. They can weigh in on amendments we say we are going to bring up the next day. They can help us understand how folks back home feel.

There is no public in the no-show, no-effort, invisible filibuster we have had since 1975. There is no public, and there are no amendments because amendments require a supermajority to close debate. Someone says: Well, I am not going to agree to that until my amendment gets up. There is no longer a social contract: You do your amendment. I will do my amendment. We will all do them. They will be on topic.

It is gone. So the number of amendments has dropped tenfold between the 109th Congress and the 116th Congress. The number of amendments dropped more than tenfold over that time period. Instead, the floor managers negotiate. The leaders negotiate. They produce a list and then ask everyone to agree to that list, and someone objects: You left out my amendment.

So we--a room full of former House Members and industry leaders, former Governors, former speakers of their State house or presidents of their State senate; all of this talent sitting around here--do nothing day after day after day while the invisible, no-show, no-effort filibuster destroys debate in the Senate of the United States of America.

It is our responsibility to restore debate in this Chamber, to restore amendments. The advantages of the restoration are, No. 1, that you have amendments; No. 2, that you have public debate; and No. 3, perhaps the most important, you have an incentive for both sides to negotiate, because under the no-show, no-effort, invisible filibuster that we have had since 1975, the minority of either side says: You know, if I can get 41 of our minority Members to agree not to close debate, and all they have to do is not even show up to vote or show up to vote if they like but vote no, then the majority can never get anything done, and won't that enhance our political power in the minority party?

That is an almost irresistible temptation in the tribal, partisan warfare of today. So each minority is tempted into basically exercising a veto over the majority party's policy agenda. That is ``an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,'' strategy. The Democrats sabotage the Republican majority. The Republicans sabotage the Democratic majority. But under the public filibuster, not only is the public involved, but the minority has to maintain continuous debate, which can be hard, so they have an incentive to negotiate. The majority, seeing the time burned up that they need for other things, other policy bills and nominations, they have an incentive to negotiate. So you get amendments. You get the public involved. Most important, you recreate an incentive to negotiate. That is the reinvigorated filibuster strategy, the talking filibuster.

Call it the public filibuster or just call it extended debate on final passage of the bill. Whatever you call it, it is better than the paralysis and partisanship that are destroying the Senate's ability to address the questions that face this Nation, and there is no more important question than defending the right of every citizen to vote.

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

Madam President, voting rights are really at the heart of our ``We the People'' Constitution.

I will tell you, every time I look at a printed copy of the Constitution and I see those three words in supersize font, ``We the People,'' I think, you know, it is a beautiful thing that our Founders, when they were writing the Constitution, reminded us of the heart of what it is all about: not power that flows down from Kings or dictators but power that flows up from the people of the United States.

And how does that power flow? It flows through elections. So if you don't have integrity in the elections, then, you really don't have government of, by, and for the people.

Now, over the course of our Nation, we know that we have worked to expand the vision the Nation was founded on, but it wasn't reached in the beginning. It was often the case that only White Protestant male landowners got to vote in the beginning.

And we recognized that every person created equal needs to have an equal

part of the franchise, and so we have, through battles over more than 200 years, fixed those challenges. And there have been some dramatic debates over this, and it hasn't been easy.

But I want to take us back specifically to the debate of 1890-1891. Now, this was during a period when, in the Southern States, more and more clever strategies were being developed to prevent people from voting, either through the registration process or through the polling process.

Now, in the registration process, there would be things like: Explain what this letter of the Constitution means or how many beans are in this jar of jelly beans or other ridiculous questions, to which those at the registrar's office could say: We are sorry. You can't register.

And if you got registered, then you would have actually the possibility of intimidation at the polling place. There was one case where men on horseback formed a circle around the ballot box so, essentially, a Black American couldn't get to the ballot box, but for a White American, the horses would part and let them vote--voter intimidation.

Well, those crude barriers are part of history. They are in the dustbin. Great. But, unfortunately, there are many modern strategies designed to get to the same result, strategies to make it hard to register to vote. Sometimes it is very prejudicial ID requirements or multiple ID requirements designed to fit the profile that members of one party are more likely to have than members of another party to bias the outcome.

Sometimes it is taking and saying: We are going to be able to have a private contractor purge the voting rolls of people who haven't voted in the last few elections--knowing that it is being done specifically because the members of one party are a little worse at turning out every single election than the members of the other party.

Now, these strategies on registration are at one stage, and then there are the strategies at the polling place, all designed to undermine ``We the People.'' And they are mostly election-day strategies.

What are those strategies? Well, take a--have a really large precinct with a single voting location in places you don't want people to vote because so many people have to get into that precinct voting place that there will be a long line or understaff it so the movement through the polling place is slow or put in machines that don't work really well or put it in a location where there is no parking, which makes it really hard for people to get to the polls.

You might think that these strategies don't still exist, but I am sorry to report to you they absolutely do exist.

A member of our caucus today, Cory Booker, was noting that, across America, the average wait time for Black Americans is twice as long as the average wait time for White Americans. But in Georgia--in Georgia-- in the last election, the average wait time was, by numbers that I have, 5 times as long or, excuse me, 10 times as long: about 5 minutes in a predominantly White precinct, 80 percent-plus White, and about 50 minutes in a predominantly Black precinct--about 10 times as long.

So along comes a couple strategies to really enable people to vote without that type of intimidation. One is vote-by-mail, and one is early voting.

Now, my State of Oregon is quite proud of being the first vote-by- mail State. So let's talk about that for a moment. Back in the 1990s, the Republican Party said: You know, we have noticed that people who have requested absentee ballots have a higher turnout rate than those who vote on election day.

It makes sense because they receive the ballot in the mail and have plenty of opportunity to fill it out, mail it in; whereas, on election day, well, life happens: You were planning to vote, but you had to go pick up your child from daycare. You were planning to vote, but your boss asked you to work late. You were planning to vote, but you went by the polling place, and it had been moved from the previous 2 years-- another trick--and you didn't know where it was. You went by the polling place, but you saw a long line, and you knew you didn't have 3 hours to stand in that line.

So the Republicans in my State said: You know what, we will have an advantage if we get all the Republicans--or as many as we can--to ask for absentee ballots. And so they did. Then the Democrats said: That is pretty smart. We will do the same thing.

So the first year I was running for the State house of representatives, 50 percent of the people in the State were voting by mail by getting on a list to ask for an absentee ballot.

So everyone said: This is such a good idea; why don't we do this for everybody and not make people request absentee ballots. So in the next election, which was the 2020 election, essentially, it was all vote-by- mail. And people loved it.

I found out going door-to-door--I always kind of had a nostalgic point in my heart for election day when we all go to the polls together. And I would go door-to-door in my first campaign in 1988, and I would say: What do you like or what do you not like? And people would generally say: The thing that I am really frustrated about--and it would be some issue for transportation. It would be some problem, including just simply the potholes in the street.

And I would say: Well, that is a city issue, but I am running for the State legislature. But maybe the State can help get more money to the municipality. But what do you like?

Oh, we love voting by mail because we can sit at the kitchen table and talk over the issues. We are not trying to make decisions in the heat of the moment in a voting booth.

We have complicated ballot measures in my State.

We can read through the pros and cons. And--you know what--we can invite our children to the kitchen table and discuss it with them.

They really loved vote-by-mail, and we went to that system. But it wasn't something driven by Ds or Rs. In fact, Republicans controlled the house and senate of the legislature in the State of Oregon at that time. They controlled both chambers.

Utah went to vote-by-mail. Utah is a reliably Republican State. Again, it wasn't to advantage one party or the other; it was to ensure that the franchise is available for every single American and that there are no shenanigans on election day. And shouldn't that be what we are all about? Because if you really want to look at where voting is compromised, where essentially votes are stolen from our citizens, it is the shenanigans on election day, which means vote-by-mail and early voting are very important to address that.

So what do we see now in some 19 States across our country? In those 19 States, there are strategies being implemented to make it harder to register and easier to purge the registration lists. There are strategies to make it harder to vote by mail, including saying: There will be no permanent vote-by-mail list; you have to sign up every single time. There are strategies to limit and curtail early voting.

Every State is a little different, but those 19 States that are passing laws, those laws are targeted with strategies specifically focused on things that they think will hurt the turnout of Democrats rather than Republicans, and it is just wrong. We need to be blind to party divisions when we are protecting the ballot box for all Americans. We need to be blind to race.

Now, folks say: Surely, there is still not a racial component in this effort to keep people from voting. And I would like to affirm that that is the case, but these strategies often target predominantly precincts that are high minority populations: Hispanic or Black precincts.

And other strategies target the young and college students. Why? Because they tend to vote a little bit more to the Democratic side of the ballot.

And some of these are targeted specifically at Native American reservations to make it so those on reservations have to drive an hour to 2 hours to drop off their ballot, and they won't vote in the same numbers as if you have a voting location on the reservation or they can vote by mail.

So we have struggled. Going back to the debate of 1890, down the hall in the House of Representatives, the conversation was initiated by Henry Cabot Lodge, and Lodge put forward a voting rights bill that said: You know what, things are going wrong in America, and we need to protect the right to register, the right to vote, and the right to

have those ballots fairly counted. So he basically said that jurisdictions could appeal to the district courts to get Federal supervision on the three critical stages of registering citizens, of conducting the election, and of counting the ballots afterward--those three phases. And it passed in the House of Representatives.

And at that time, it was the Republican Party that backed this fundamental right for all Americans. You know how many Democrats voted for Henry Cabot Lodge's bill? Zero. Zero. Every vote for it came from the Republican Party. That was the Republican Party in 1890.

In 1891, the bill was here in the Senate. Well, what happened in the Senate? Well, a group of Senators said: We don't want the Senate to ever vote on this bill. So they spoke at length, refused to give unanimous consent to get to a final vote.

Now, why do we call that a filibuster? So, at our founding, the whole vision that our Founders laid out was that you hear everyone speak, and then you vote and you take the path the majority favors over the minority.

Now, they really emphasized--this is important--that you shouldn't have a supermajority because they wrote the Constitution while they were under the Confederation Congress. The Confederation Congress had a supermajority. And because of that supermajority, they couldn't get anything done. They couldn't raise the money to take on Shays' Rebellion. The Senate was paralyzed over policymaking.

So the Founders said: Whatever you do, do not have a supermajority because it paralyzes the body, and the body ends up taking the path the minority prefers, who are obstructing a final vote, rather than the majority.

Let's just look at some of the comments that our Founders made. James Madison:

In cases where justice or the general good might require

new laws . . . or [new] measures . . . the . . . principle of

free government would be reversed.

He is speaking to a supermajority because it would no longer be the majority that would decide; it would be transferred to the minority. And he went on to say the damage that would be done if that happened: The basic principle of free government would be assaulted if the minority makes the decision instead of the majority.

What possible logic could there be to say the path that most people think is the wrong path is the path we will take? That is what happens when the supermajority blocks a final simple majority vote.

And we have Hamilton. Of course, Hamilton gets a lot of attention with the play done on Hamilton and his general supersized role in the early stage of our Republic.

Again, Hamilton was very aware of how the Confederation Congress was polarized before we got our Constitution in 1787. He, again, refers to the supermajority: It would be, in practice, as if you need everybody; and the history of any establishment that takes this principle is the result of impotence, perplexity, and disorder. He is referring to the supermajority requirement of the Confederation Congress.

What else did he say? Well, Hamilton said--and he uses some language we don't really use today: ``If a pertinacious minority can control the majority . . . tedious delays; continual negotiation and intrigue; contemptible compromises of the public good.''

I sometimes think that sounds like a description of the Senate today--tedious delays, intrigue, contemptible compromises of the public good. The public good is compromised when the Senate is not able to debate issues that face the United States of America.

He went on to say: ``The supermajority's real operation is to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the government.''

``Destroy the energy of the government''? Doesn't that ring somewhat true of what we have gone through in trying to get to a vote on Build Back Better over this last year, any components of it, and trying to get a vote to protect our fundamental right and freedom to vote? And it has gone on all year. We are a year into the administration now.

So in modern times, we now are facing, again, what was faced in 1890. And I didn't really tell you the outcome of that 1890 debate. The House passed it. All Republicans came over here, and a number of Senators said: We are not going to give consent to get to a final vote.

They broke the contract--the social contract that you listen to everybody, and then, having heard all the ideas, having had a debate that maybe stretched many, many days or maybe weeks, you vote.

So the newspapers started to call this tactic, way back in the mid- 1800s--they called this tactic--``piracy,'' because the core principle was being violated by people taking over the Senate--pirates taking over the Senate. And the common term for pirates, ``freebooters''-- freebooters, that is where ``filibuster'' comes from. It is a corruption of the term ``freebooter.''

The pirates are taking over. They are breaking the deal of America. They are breaking the design of the Senate. It is supposed to be that after you listen to everyone--everyone has made their points--you vote by simple majority.

Now, we have had a particular development over the last three decades in which the Senate has become more and more dysfunctional. I had the chance to see this evolve because I first came here as an intern in 1976. And up in the staff Gallery, I would go up and watch each amendment being debated.

And there was no television. So Senators couldn't see what was going on. Staff back in the offices couldn't see what was going on. There was no cell phone. There was no fax machine. And so each Senator had a staff member watching the debate. And then when the vote came, you would rush down to those elevators that are outside that door. And when the Senators came up from the subway train that comes over from the office buildings, you would meet your Senator, and you would describe the debate that had happened. And if it was your particular topic area, you would describe what people back home were saying or what you had understood was the key question. And then the Senator would come in and vote.

And then, when the vote was tallied, there would be 6 or 12 Senators, generally clustered here, and they would all say ``Mr. President,'' because whomever got called on first got the next amendment. There was no set of amendments lined up on the Tax Reform Act of 1976, which is what I was staffing for Senator Hatfield.

I was very intrigued by the functioning of our government. So I went back to college and then dropped out 3 months later to come back here for the start of the Carter administration to watch what was going on in our government with a new Presidency. I waited tables. I volunteered for nonprofits. I went door to door for the Virginia Consumer Congress, working on issues related to renewable energy or energy efficiency. But I watched the Senate, and what I saw was a Senate that could debate issues in that year of 1977.

Then I came back here after graduate school, and I was planning to go overseas to work on issues of economic development in very poor countries--fundamental issues of healthcare, fundamental issues of education. But I was offered an opportunity to work on something here in DC as a Presidential fellow, to work on the issue of ``How do you decrease the threat of blowing up the world with nuclear weapons?''

So I went to work for the Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, under President Reagan. Then I went to work for the Congressional Budget Office, after 2 years of working for President Reagan and Caspar Weinberger. The Congressional Budget Office works for Congress, and I did studies and did briefings here on the Hill, watching the Senate. And the Senate started to have troubles, but it was still pretty functional.

Nothing prepared me for arriving here as a U.S. Senator in 2009, January, and seeing the utter decay and dysfunction of my beloved Senate--your beloved Senate, the Senate once called the greatest deliberative body in the world.

So I started to have conversations with colleagues about what had happened, and I saw that we had cloture motions--that is a motion to close debate--one after the other after the other and very few amendments.

Now, on the amendment side, this is a chart that shows the decline in amendments from the 109th Congress to the 116th. The 116th Congress is the

one that just ended. There is a tenfold reduction in the number of amendments over those 14 years--a tenfold reduction in amendments, a steady line downwards.

Well, that is one symptom of the problem, but then there was another piece of this problem, which was more and more motions to close debate. And those motions are designed to be rare. So they take--after you make the motion--a day plus. You have to have an intervening day, and then the second day after you make the motion, you can hold a vote on closing debate, because it is supposed to be such a rare moment, once or twice a year.

Then, if you succeed in getting the votes to close debate, it is 30 hours of debate. Well, that takes 2 or 3 days to get 30 hours of debate in and then an extra hour for any Senator who didn't have the chance to speak. So there is that factor. And then, finally, you can get to the final vote.

Those cloture motions eat up entire weeks. So you come in, and, on Monday, you file a motion to close debate. On Wednesday, you vote on actually closing debate because you have to have that intervening day of Tuesday. Then you have 30 hours, which takes the time up of the normal day of Wednesday and Thursday, and maybe on Friday you get to vote.

That is what I am saying: Every cloture motion takes up a week. Well, the Senate is normally only here 30 to 40 weeks a year. So if you have 30 or 40 cloture motions, you have essentially taken up all the Senate's time. But the Senate has an incredibly complex, extensive agenda. It needs to address so many issues in healthcare and housing and education, good-paying jobs, the environment. How do you take on climate? How do you take on international trade? How do you take on human rights in foreign countries like China, which are conducting genocide? So many issues around the world, plus it has so many nominations that have to be addressed.

I am told--I haven't double-checked this yet--that there were four Cabinet positions that required confirmation in the first Congress-- four. Then you had Ambassadors, and you had judges. But you had a pretty small number of nominations in those positions. Now, we have well over a thousand positions--well over a thousand--and we have a nomination process in which people are nominated to have a higher rank in the military or advancement to certain ranks in the civil service. And so you have extensive lists that need to go through as well.

So let's take a look at what happened with the growth of cloture motions. This is the history going back to 1910. We actually only had cloture starting in 1917. And, in 1917, you see that there were very few cloture motions in a decade--3 in a decade, 10 in a decade, 5 in a decade, 8 in a decade, 3 in a decade--less than 1 per year.

Well, that intervening day kind of made sense because they were less than one time per year. It was supposed to be a rare moment in which you would address the fact that some Senators were not going to let the Senate proceed as our Founders envisioned, which was, after hearing everybody, to conduct a vote.

Then you start to see in the 1970s a big change. I think we have a chart that shows it year by year. We don't. Well, this will give you some sense of it. So we have--divided by 10, since these are by decade--we had growth in the 1980s to more than 20 per year; a growth in the 1990s to more than--well, an average of 35 to 36 a year. In the 2000s, an average of 45 per year. In the 2010 decade, an average of over 100 per year, taking up an entire week of the Senate's time.

So how did this unfold? Well, let's think a little bit about the fact that that filibuster that occurred in 1891 was about blocking Black Americans from having power--the power to vote--because if you have the power to vote, you have the power to weigh in. That means you have a lot of power in our society. So there was a deep determination to keep Black Americans from voting.

That was the filibuster of 1891. And its failure in the Senate-- remember, it passed by a majority in the House, and it had majority support in the Senate, but the filibuster was used to crush this.

Now, that process meant that, from 1891 through 1965, when we passed voting rights in this Chamber, the filibuster was used for one thing: crushing the political rights of Black Americans.

Now, someone will say: Well, that is not quite right. There was an episode in 1917 in which the issue wasn't civil rights or voting rights. The issue was whether to arm our commercial ships against potential attacks by the Germans.

And that is partly true.

In March of that year, 1917, we weren't yet in the war, World War I. And there was a group of Senators who said: If we arm these ships and they deployed depth charges against German submarines or so forth, we are going to be in the war, and we will not have had a declaration of war. We will be pulled into the war by essentially this process of arming ships.

So they spoke at length during the last week of Congress, and time ran out, and the bill died. And the next week, the new Congress started. This is back when the transition happened in March. And the new Congress immediately said: We can close debate with 67 votes or two-thirds of the Senate. Actually, it was two-thirds; we didn't have 100 Senators here--two-thirds of the Senate, showing up to vote and close debate. So that was the first time that we had a motion to close debate since 1805.

And the reason I say it is since 1805, is that our original rules had a motion called the previous question. And on the previous question, there is a little bit of uncertainty of exactly how it was used. It sometimes said that, basically, you got to speed things up so we can get to the final vote. Other times, it has been interpreted as ``No, the previous question means we vote; we vote on the question before us.'' But it was never actually used, and it wasn't used because there was a social contract.

The Senate said: We can listen to everybody, and, then, having heard everybody, we can vote.

Fair enough. Fair deal. Square deal.

So in 1805, when Aaron Burr was in charge of rewriting the rule book, he said: We don't use this rule. We don't need this rule. We have a social contract. We listen to everybody and then have a simple majority vote, as our Founders designed the Senate. No need.

So we hadn't had a rule that essentially enabled this body to come to a vote in that period from 1805 through 1917. So it is true that the bill was delayed for 1 week. But the new Congress immediately came in, created a new rule to close debate, closed debate on that bill, and passed a bill to arm ships. So the only real thing that was crushed in those years from 1891 through 1965 was voting rights for Black Americans because the idea that you would prevent a simple majority vote, as our Founders intended, was piracy.

Well, in 1965, we passed voting rights, and the national consensus was we are putting that behind us; we are putting the discrimination behind us; we are putting the manipulation on election day behind us. We are going to have a fair opportunity for everybody to vote in this country. So the filibuster lost some of its taint because it was no longer primarily an instrument to crush the political rights of Black Americans.

People started saying: You know, maybe I can use this on something other than civil rights or something other than voting rights.

By the way, it had been used almost entirely on final passage of bills.

Maybe I can use it on nominations, to prevent nominations from going through expeditiously. Maybe I can use it on amendments. Maybe I can use it on motions to proceed.

Let's take a look at the issue of amendments. Prior to the sixties, one time, there had been a cloture motion on an amendment.

You know that vision that I saw in 1976 where one amendment was debated, and then when it was done, there were no pending amendments, so the next person would say: ``Wait''--they would always say ``Mr. President'' because there was always a man in the Chair at that point; I am now glad to say ``Madam President''--``Madam President,'' and whoever got heard first would put up the next amendment.

Well, that world started to change along the way. People started to obstruct not just final passage but obstruct amendments. There has been

steady growth in that over time. We are now up, in the last decade, to about 14 times per year or 143 times in the decade.

Then we have the question of the motion to proceed. You would think-- we have a legislative calendar, and that calendar has a list of bills eligible to consider. Someone says: I want to make a motion--normally the majority leader--to go to a particular item, a particular bill on that calendar. You would think that it would be like ``Hey, we are going to go to the election bill. Do I have majority support to do that?'' You would have a 15-minute debate and vote. You decide to go to that bill or not.

Why would you take up a lot of the Senate's precious time debating whether to debate a bill? But that logic has not prevailed, so we have a continuous increase in the attack on the ability to get a bill to the floor. Well, in the sixties, about one per year; in the seventies, about one per year; four times per year in the eighties; more than 10 in the nineties--it escalates.

Here is the thing: To get a bill to the floor, if a group is intent on forcing a cloture motion, you have to have a motion, an intervening day, 30 hours of debate, and then you have to be able to have an additional hour for any Senator who wasn't able to speak in those 30 hours. In other words, it takes an entire week to decide whether to actually debate a bill. That is absolutely insane.

If you want the U.S. Senate to be unable to address issues, then allow unlimited debate until there is a cloture motion on the motion to proceed. I think most Senators agree that that should go. But here is the problem: Whichever party is in the minority doesn't want to make things easier for the majority. And this really goes to a core challenge of our highly tribal parties.

In the Senate that I first saw, the philosophies of the two parties-- if you were doing a bell curve of each party, they overlapped. They overlapped a lot. There were Republicans who voted more like Democrats and Democrats who voted more like Republicans. There was a lot more, therefore, bipartisan work. Now, if you do those same two bell curves on how people vote, there is a chasm. If you do a bell curve where the Democrats are and a bell curve where the Republicans are, there is a deep valley, a chasm in the middle.

We have become more intensely tribal in ways that are absolutely reinforced by social media, all those commentaries on various Instagrams or a tweet reinforcing the idea that the other side is evil, that the two sides are far apart, which leads the minority in this Chamber to say: Since the other side is evil, we will just prevent them from ever getting to a bill. If 41 of us--and right now, there are 50 desks on this side of the aisle, and there are 50 desks on that side of the aisle--if 41 of us proceed to say we will not vote to close debate on a motion to proceed, you can never get to a bill.

We have had that happen multiple times this year in which my Republican colleagues voted to prevent us from debating voting rights, the protection of voting rights. What a change from 1890, when, in the House of Representatives, every vote cast for the bill to defend the right to vote in America was a Republican vote. Now, every vote against debating the issue has come from the Republicans. What a swap over the time period.

This, essentially, is a strategy to kill bills in the cradle before they are debated on this floor.

Both caucuses, by the way, have done this. When I speak of voting rights, it is now my colleagues across the aisle who are deliberately blocking it from being debated time and again, but on other issues and when the Democrats have been in the minority, we have done the same thing. It needs to end.

You know, I had conversations with a whole group of Republicans last year saying: Next year, we have no idea who will be in the majority. We have no idea. So let's just have 1 hour at most, evenly divided, to discuss whether a bill comes to the floor, and then we will vote. Instead of an intervening day and 30 hours, plus extra hours if you didn't get to debate, you have 1 hour evenly divided. If one side yields back its time, that means in 30 minutes, we can then decide to get on the bill or not.

Thirty hours, an intervening day, or 30 minutes. That makes a lot more sense. We have to end this.

I have had this conversation with nine of my colleagues across the aisle and said: Let's do this. Let's fix the motion to proceed and guarantee germane amendments on the floor.

They were interested. Some said they would go and take it to their policy team, some said they would take it to their caucus, and some said they would take it to their leadership. Then they all said ``Sorry'' because their leadership said ``No way are we going to have kind of the ordinary Senators who aren't in leadership have a movement to fix the Senate.''

Mitch McConnell told them: No. We will make changes depending on what is best for our caucus. And if we are in the majority, that is different than if we are in the minority.

So those efforts failed, and people keep saying to me: Hey, wouldn't it work if you draw up rules and implement them with the next Congress?

Well, we have tried that. My colleague Tom Udall, who is now our Ambassador to New Zealand, was there, coming in with my class in 2009. He had followed this as well. So we teamed up, and we worked on these conversations, but ultimately we couldn't make it happen.

We need to fix the Senate. We need to guarantee germane amendments. When I say ``germane amendments,'' I mean amendments that are on the topic.

When I was staffing that tax bill for Senator Hatfield, every amendment was on taxes. Should we proceed to increase or rein in the tax credit that goes--or the tax deduction that goes to deducting the cost of your home office if you are a teacher in our public schools? It was one I heard in a lot of letters. There were a ton of letters from teachers in Oregon about that.

I remember that another amendment was on employee stock ownership plans, which enable you to be able to enable your workers to own a share of the company. How do we make those ESOPs work better? and so on and so forth, one tax issue after another--nothing to do with highly polarizing social issues on a tax bill because people knew that when another bill came on healthcare, they could put healthcare issues on that. When one came on transportation, they could put their transportation amendments on it.

Now the assumption is, hey, if there is a bill that is going to pass, we better throw in every idea we ever had because that is like the only bill that will get through the Senate. The result is these massively thick bills, which are an insult to democracy because in a 1,000- or a 2,000-page bill, you are talking about thousands of ideas, of new laws, of new ideas being embedded.

There is no way the citizens can hold us accountable when we are voting on a bill that is yea thick. There are a bunch of things that are good. There are a bunch of things that are bad. Plus, we can't even figure out what some of them are before we have to vote because when the deal is struck off the floor because we can't do amendments and because there is no debate, well, we are stuck with a big bill being delivered and described to us. That is not the way it should work. That is not good for us. That is not good for the citizens.

Let's note that what is happening in those 19 States puts us at an absolutely critical moment. You can think of democracy as a flickering flame or a flame that has to be maintained and nurtured from one generation to the next. Now, it is our challenge--our challenge-- because laws are being passed on registration, laws are being passed on the process of voting, and laws are being passed on the process of counting that are designed to manipulate the outcome, to basically cheat Americans out of a fair election and, in many cases, cheat them out of the opportunity to vote at all or if they can vote, not have their vote fairly counted. So it is our responsibility to act.

I see my colleague from Massachusetts has come to the floor. I think she is ready to speak.

I just want to sum up with this notion: The failure of this Senate to act in 1891 led to three generations in which civil rights for Black Americans were suppressed in our country. If we fail to act--if we fail to act this year, 2022, and allow the authentic integrity of elections--then we may see three generations in which we lose government of, by, and for the people.

You see, voting rights are the critical component because if those who are elected break the laws or go off track, you throw them out through fair elections, but if they go off track and there are no fair elections, they increase their power.

You have to have fair elections to maintain government of, by, and for the people. That is the reason we must act this week to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act that are before this Senate right now.

I yield to my colleague from the great State of Massachusetts.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 3 p.m., Monday, January 10; 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; and that upon conclusion of morning business, the Senate proceed to executive session and resume consideration of the Davidson nomination.