Mr. President, I rise to join my colleagues to oppose the attempt by the President and his allies in Congress to effectively disenfranchise millions of Americans through their so-called SAVE America Act. But more than that, I rise to join…
Mr. President, I rise to join my colleagues to oppose the attempt by the President and his allies in Congress to effectively disenfranchise millions of Americans through their so-called SAVE America Act. But more than that, I rise to join my fellow Granite Staters and the majority of freedom-loving Americans to ask a question more fundamental.
I have strong issues with this legislation, which I will discuss, but more than any provision, what I object to today is what this move to make it harder for more citizens of all ages to vote reveals about the President, the President's undemocratic impulse--an impulse that dominates and motivates this President in a way that distinguishes him from all of his predecessors.
In short, I rise today because I believe that it is worth asking: Why is it that the leader of the free world, the President of the world's greatest democracy, is so invested in spending his truly precious time making it harder for Americans to vote?
In the ``Live Free or Die'' State, we know that elections serve as the best means to hold elected leaders to account. In other words, elections are the very basis of self-government of, by, and for the people. That is the basic compact in a democracy. If a leader fails to deliver on his promises, fails to govern well, or fails in conduct or character, then citizens use their votes to hold him to account and vote him out.
That is what makes a democracy different. We have the means to self- correct and to improve, unlike any other form of government.
Democracy is the best form of government, not because we have always been perfect but because we always have the capacity to be more perfect.
With each generation, we have worked to more fully realize our Declaration of Independence's promise. The right to vote has steadily expanded until it was finally bestowed upon all Americans.
We have had setbacks along the way. Progress has often been slower than we would like. But the majority of Americans have understood, as President Kennedy said, that democracy is not ``a final achievement'' but ``an untiring effort.'' And it has always been an effort that required nothing less than what our Founders pledged: the lives, fortunes, and sacred honors of each generation of Americans.
But it appears that this President thinks that America's great democratic experiment has gone too far, that far too many Americans are making their voices heard for his liking.
Over the course of our history, we have had Presidents disagree on just about every issue. But in our modern history, ever since we passed critical civil rights and voting rights legislation, Presidents in both parties have agreed that our country's operation as a democracy is nonnegotiable, and that we are all better off when more and more Americans vote.
Now, though, we have the first President in these modern times who is trying to make it harder for eligible voters to vote.
President Trump's anti-voting crusade raises a fundamental question: Why is the President of the world's greatest democracy so invested in making it harder for Americans to vote?
Well, the answer is simple. The President wants fewer Americans to vote because he is the first President in American history who does not believe that he is accountable to them, the American people--``we the people''--because only a President who believes that he
is not accountable to the people would try to restrict the people's ability to hold him to account.
Leaders who believe that they answer to ``we the people'' do not try to overrule the people's voice and the people's vote by seeking to overturn a free and fair election.
Leaders who believe that they answer to the people do not try to silence free speech. They don't use the heavy hand of government to drive critics off the airwaves because they made jokes that the President doesn't like.
Leaders who believe that they answer to the people don't use the Justice Department and the FBI to exact revenge on their political foes. They don't seek to extend the long arm of the law into an iron fist of injustice.
Leaders who believe that they answer to the people don't defy court orders. They don't disregard the Constitution; nor do they ignore laws passed by the people's representatives and snatch from their hands the powers of the purse, taking away the people's money.
They don't send our heroes in uniform into harm's way without the people's consent nor do they launch trade wars against our own allies on the basis of nothing but their own ego and whim. They don't revel in power and self-aggrandizement nor do their references to dictators drip with admiration.
And let us be very clear. Leaders who believe that they answer to ``we the people,'' leaders who believe that they are accountable to the people and who understand that it is freedom and democracy that make America great--they don't incite a mob to storm the Capitol--to storm this very Chamber to stop the peaceful transfer of power; to stop the count and silence the votes of the American people, and they certainly don't spend their first day on the job pardoning the mob of convicted criminals who stormed the Capitol and assaulted brave police officers.
Take these actions each as one or take them all together. Everyone in this body knows that not only has no other President behaved this way but that no one can describe these acts as resembling anything close to patriotism, not in a country that loves freedom as much as ours does.
The President of the United States of America is supposed to embody our love of freedom, of American democracy, but, today, it is an open question as to whether this President actually believes in democracy and the consent of the governed. This shouldn't be a question that any American even has to consider, but we are compelled to consider it today.
So, look. We can pretend that this is politics as usual, but all of my colleagues know that no President in our modern history--if ever, up until now--has possessed such a stark anti-democratic impulse or has been so disdainful of the people's voices or of our laws and liberties when they run counter to his own will.
For those who disagree, I direct you to the walls and windows around this great building that are scarred by bullet holes from just 5 years ago that remind us otherwise.
It is worth noting that the only reason the SAVE America Act--this legislation to purge voters that the President doesn't like from the rolls--that the only reason it is even on the floor is that the President won't give up on the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, and he is continuing this same singularly dishonorable brand of lies as we head into this year's midterm. What the majority in this body is doing, therefore, is nothing short of a large, elaborate, expensive bit of legislative play-acting--all because there appear to be no people in the President's orbit to find the courage to summon the words: I am sorry, Mr. President, but you are wrong. That unwillingness to speak truth to power is how lies become truths and how bills that are nothing less than solutions in search of a problem get written.
Now, the President can delude himself. That doesn't mean that the rest of us have to do so as well. There are legitimate debates to be had about election reforms, including voter ID laws, but not when the laws are seemingly designed by legislators to discourage or bar people from voting, not when the law is passed upon the orders of a President, as he himself has said, as the means to win a midterm election.
My colleagues have spoken at length about the details of this bill, so I won't spend too long relitigating them here.
In short, this bill would require all voters to register using either their birth certificates or their passports. Now, only half of Americans even have a passport. It has been estimated that 3.8 million American citizens do not currently have either of these documents in their possession. To put that number in perspective, a bit more than 826,000 Granite Staters voted in the last Presidential election. So this bill says that a great swath of American citizens--close to five times the number of total votes cast in New Hampshire in the last election--shouldn't be allowed to vote next time. What is more, this bill would virtually end absentee voting as we know it, which is how one in three American citizens votes. That is tens of millions of Americans.
Who are these Americans whose liberties the President would effectively dispense with?
Well, they are both Democrats and Republicans. Many are older Americans. Some have long since lost their birth certificates and don't do the kind of traveling that requires passports. Some have chronic conditions with disabilities that require them to vote by mail. Some are people who work 12-hour shifts or who have long commutes to their jobs. Others are veterans who are as patriotic as any American alive but who spend most of their time at home these days, living in the country, far from the nearest polling place, and they have been voting by mail longer than some in this body have even been alive.
In the end, all of them are Americans, and their right to vote is sacred. It was won through sacrifice and wars abroad and given renewed meaning at places like Seneca Falls and Selma here at home.
Should the so-called SAVE America Act pass and be signed into law, fewer Americans--people who have worked hard and paid their taxes their whole lives--will be able to vote than before. It will be harder for a substantial number of Americans to vote.
If this bill is enacted, there will be more Americans who, in practice, will have less of a voice in our democracy. They will be less free. The number of Americans who will lose their ability to vote may well be in the millions. Perhaps some will eventually find a way to jump through all the new legal hoops and cut through all the redtape and get their ballots in. Even if it becomes a relatively few number who remain unable to navigate these new barriers, we are still talking about law-abiding, tax-paying Americans who will lose their ability to vote--even as citizens of the world's greatest democracy.
If this bill passes, it will also represent an enormous deviation in our history. Our country's progress has been marked by a history in which more and more Americans--Americans in each ensuing generation-- have gained the right to vote; but if this legislation passes, President Trump will be the first President to turn that progress back--to work to restrict the right to vote--and to take it away, in practice, from a great swath of Americans. Among those impacted, in particular, will be women. This bill makes it harder for women to register to vote should they have changed their names when they married--names that will be different from what appears on their birth certificates.
Now, perhaps this is a simple hurdle that the administration would move with great speed to help women resolve, but I cannot see myself extending the benefit of the doubt on the rights and freedoms of American women to an administration that has worked hard to take away a woman's most fundamental freedom--the freedom to make her own healthcare decisions.
This bill would also require all States to hand over their voter rolls, including names, addresses, and Social Security numbers, to the President. To do this under any administration would be a move that raises concern, but particularly with this administration, it would be an act of supreme recklessness.
Why should any American trust their Social Security number to an administration whose internet privacy standards involve leaking war plans over an insecure Signal chat?
To have one's personal information handled by the chaotic band of untrained, unchecked, and unprofessional political appointees who ran enterprises like DOGE would be as wise as to staff the local fire department with a brigade of arsonists.
So this bill is, on substance, exceedingly harmful and unjust. It should be rejected.
However, I return to my original question: With all of the challenges in the world, why this bill? Why now? Why is the President so determined to make it harder for Americans to vote?
I understand in a way why the President does not wish to be held accountable by the American people. It is that he has failed to deliver to the American people because, of course, in a democracy, at some point, a leader has to deliver. Autocrats don't.
Do you think, in Putin's Russia, that in the depths of the Kremlin somewhere, they are drawing up plans for measures similar to the Americans with Disabilities Act or the PACT Act?
Of course not. A dictator doesn't need to make people's lives better. There is no one to hold them to account. There is no one to push them to deliver.
But a democracy? A democracy is different. In a democracy, talk can win an election, but without results, a leader can lose a nation; and 1 year in, this President has lost the majority of Americans.
The President came into office with big promises--boasts, really-- about how he would singlehandedly bring down high costs. Now, of course, I disagree with the President strongly on many issues, and I didn't vote for him, but I was willing to and continue to be willing on a bipartisan basis to find ways to work with my colleagues in the Senate to help bring relief to American families, but President Trump has chosen a very different course.
The President is trying to silence the votes and voices of the American people because he doesn't want to be held to account, because he thinks he is above the people, and he does not want to hear what they have to say. He does not want to hear that this is not a nation entering a golden age; that instead, to paraphrase Thomas Paine some 250 years after he first coined the phrase: Our Nation is entering a time that tries citizens' souls.
We are entering a new American crisis. It is a crisis of costs. The American people have been clamoring for relief--relief from high grocery bills and energy costs, relief from high rent and steep mortgages, relief from a healthcare system that forces families to choose between being sick and dying or being healthy and in debt.
Our country was already in an affordability crisis, but the President, rather than solving problems, has made it worse. He chose-- he chose--to take away healthcare from millions of Americans. He chose to make premiums surge for tens of millions more. He did all of this while giving billionaires a tax break. Some people call this tax break unpaid for, but in some ways, it is worse. The tax breaks for billionaires will be paid for. They will be paid for by our children, who will be burdened with trillions in debt, and they will be paid for by every person who gets sick who might have been healthy had the President not taken away their healthcare--a toll summarized less on budget sheets and more on the faces of loved ones in hospital waiting rooms.
Americans want to go to the grocery store without grimacing at the cash register, but the President has launched senseless trade wars against our allies and imposed illegal and costly tariffs that have made everything more expensive. Virtually every entrepreneur I talk to in New Hampshire has felt the burden of tariffs one way or another. Some businesses have closed their doors altogether.
These trade wars should be a reminder to my Republican colleagues that a politics that exists simply to flatter the President's ego does not come without a cost, and it is a cost borne by the people to whom he has sworn an oath to serve. Now the costs of this Presidency have become even higher as gas prices surge. It is as if the President is searching for new ways to make life less affordable.
The truth is simple: It costs more to be an American under President Trump. The American people asked for lower costs. The President, instead, gave them a steeper bill.
It is no surprise that a man who has only made the crisis of high costs even worse under his watch does not wish to answer to the people. He can lie about stolen elections. It is harder to lie about the numbers Americans see printed on the very receipts that they hold in their hands.
Under this President, we are also awash in the crisis of corruption. While Americans lose more of their paychecks to high costs and tariffs, the President rakes in billions in exchange for political favors because, in Donald Trump's America, it is easier for someone rich to buy a pardon than it is for millions of Americans to afford to buy their prescriptions.
Perhaps the cause of most alarm is that we face a crisis as a country because the President has realized that he is at his strongest when America is most divided. There are great and challenging things that we need to do as a country--a new 21st century economy to build, costs to bring down, diseases to cure, veterans to care for--but we can do none of these things because we have to fight to keep our heads above water in floods of the President's own making and because the President tries to get us to spend our days fighting each other.
I am not surprised that the President doesn't want to be held accountable by the people. I am not surprised that the President wants fewer Americans to vote because, on his watch, our country has become less affordable, our people less healthy, our world more chaotic, our government more corrupt, and our people more angry. Of course he doesn't want to hear what the American people have to say.
So, yes, it is deeply telling that in this moment of American crisis--both self-inflicted by this administration and otherwise-- President Trump has decided that above all else, the most important priority is not to bring down people's costs or make their lives better; it is to try to restrict their right to vote.
What, ultimately, does the President's obsessive focus on trying to pass this bill above all others truly reveal? Sometimes it is as simple as it appears: The President wants to pass into law a bill that will allow fewer Americans to vote because he actually wants fewer Americans to vote.
It was President Reagan who said that ``the right to vote is the crown jewel of American liberties, and we will not see its luster diminished.'' We shall find out soon if his words remain true.
The American people--they have always known how precious the right to vote is. The American people--they will wait in long lines even on a cold November morning to vote. But they will do more than just that. They will join the suffragists and rally and petition and do whatever it takes until the ballot belongs to America's daughters and not just her sons. Americans will fill out their ballots while stationed at a foreign post--in trenches in France or the jungles of the Pacific--and ship them back home as soon as they can just so they make sure their vote gets counted, casting their ballots halfway across the world as they fight to ensure that others can have the freedom to vote at all.
Americans won't just stand in line at a polling station to vote; they will march to vote, even if it means going down to Selma, just as Granite Staters from Saint Anselm College did when they joined Dr. King's marchers, even if it means trying to cross a bridge three times, even if it means enduring Bloody Sunday.
Voting is not just an American right; it is an American habit; it is an American prayer.
We do all this because most Americans understand what the President does not--that voting is the most American thing anyone can do.
I oppose the SAVE America Act because of its provisions, yes, but what I object to the most about this bill to restrict the right to vote is what it says about the current state of the American Presidency and our democracy. That an American President would try to pass this bill is an outrage.
Rather than work to pass this bill, the President would instead be wise to remember the words of his great predecessor Abraham Lincoln, who said:
In leaving the people's business in their own hands, we
cannot be wrong.
This law has been called the SAVE America Act. It is a striking name to me because when I think of when America has needed to be saved, I think of our determination to be saved from British tyranny in our fight for independence; our need to be saved from the Depression or economic hardship; from disunion or division. But apparently this President thinks that America needs to be saved from her own voters, that America needs to be saved from ``we the People.''
I also think it is worth noting what the SAVE America Act will not save. It will not save American families from paying more for their groceries or at the pump. It will not save the small business that has had to close its doors because the President decided to launch senseless trade wars against our friends. It will not save a young couple money on their downpayment when they are trying to buy their first home--not as long as we have a President who would rather build monuments to honor his name than help our country build more homes that people can afford to live in. It will not save a single American from pricey healthcare premiums, nor will it save the future lives lost to diseases that could have been treated had the President not fired America's best doctors and researchers. It will not save our children from burdensome debt tomorrow to pay for tax giveaways to billionaires today. It will not save America from the dangers of dictators like Vladimir Putin, whom the President still vainly tries to appease.
But more than that, this law won't save America from the flames of division that the President so often fans, from the meanness and coarseness that he revels in. It will not save America from the march of extremism or the grip of conspiracy. It will not save us from more discouraging broadcasts of the nightly news, of watching our supposed leaders with disbelief, of wondering just how much higher prices will soar. It won't save a young girl who wanted to get involved in public service, wanted to help her country, from becoming disillusioned when she sees what happens in Washington these days, from wondering if our country's politics can offer anything of promise or if only cynicism reigns. It will not save an old veteran from shaking his head and asking what yet might happen to his country he loves, in whose service he risked so much.
This law, in short, won't save our fellow Americans--certainly not from high costs. It will not save America. This law seeks to save nothing but the President's political fortunes. Because, in the end, one does not save America by ensuring that fewer Americans vote. One cannot save America by making America less free.
Does this body wish to save America? to learn to become a country once more? to do great things together once more? The answer remains what it has always been: Don't restrict the right to vote. Don't turn to answers from the would-be strongman. Instead, leave the saving to the ``we the people'' and put it in their hands. When we do that, truly, as Lincoln said, we cannot be wrong, and we cannot go wrong.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.