Floor Statements

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the following decision from the Government Accountability Office be printed in the Record.

Madam President, if the motion for the Senate to adjourn with pro forma sessions scheduled until September 14 would have been a recorded rollcall vote, I would have voted no.

Mr. President, I would like to address the Senate today regarding a bill that has been passed by the House of Representatives known as H.R. 7008. H.R. 7008 performs two badly needed functions to restore faith and integrity in our system of government: Firstly, it bans Members of Congress from using their unique access and knowledge to profit through stock market speculation; secondly, it requires something very simple, a voter ID.

You have got to show an ID when you pick up something at will call if you are there to pick up tickets to the theater, if you are picking up a prescription at the pharmacy, if you are going to the bank, if you are boarding an airplane--you are doing all kinds of things that are part of Americans' day-to-day experience where it matters whether you are who you claim to be, you have got to show an ID.

We should require nothing less when it comes to the exercise of one of the most fundamental rights that Americans have; that is, their right to vote.

You see, when someone else votes in your place, they displace your vote. They offset your vote. If they are double voting, if they are voting when they are not allowed to vote because they are not a citizen or otherwise, if they do something foolish and they try to go and vote, they will be caught if they are asked to produce an ID at the balloting place.

So this bill accomplishes both of these things. And like I say, both of them would do a lot to restore faith, confidence, and integrity in our system of government.

Dealing specifically with the voter ID requirement in this legislation, this is a very straightforward requirement. When you show up to vote, you just have to show an ID, just like you do at the bank, just like you do at the pharmacy or the doctor's office or the bank or when boarding an airplane.

And if you vote by mail, then that is easy to accommodate. You just include a simple photocopy of your photo ID.

Now, we have gone to great lengths to make sure that everyone is taken care of here, to make sure that there is not a single U.S. citizen that would be disadvantaged or unable to vote if we were to pass this.

So for those who, let's say, for whatever reason, don't have access to a photocopier and they want to vote by mail, well, we have taken that into consideration. The bill requires States

to provide the public to free access to photocopy machines so they can make a photocopy of their photo ID and send it in with their mail-in ballot if that is what they are using in their State.

Now, it is interesting. Right now the headquarters of the Democratic Party here in Washington, DC, displays a sign very prominently, and that sign makes clear that 100 percent of the visitors to the Democratic Party's headquarters have to show a photo ID when they enter.

Now, if they have to do that--and we know they have to do that when attending the Democratic National Convention to enter the convention hall, much less participate as a voting member of the Democratic National Convention. You have to prove who you are, and you have to show that you have the right to be there and the right to participate.

So far be it from us to second guess the Democratic Party in deciding people need to prove who they are to enter their convention hall or their party headquarters. We should have voters do the same thing.

And Democrats are smart in doing that because, after all, they don't want somebody showing up to their convention. I mean, good heavens, what if a Republican showed up to their Democratic National Convention and tried to skew the results of their convention by pretending to be a Democrat--a Democrat delegate no less. That wouldn't be fair.

So they are absolutely right to require photo ID and to require delegates to present their convention credentials so that they can show that they are who they claim to be and that they have the right to participate at their own convention.

Americans at every corner of our country and at every point along the political idealogical spectrum in this country agree that this makes sense to do, specifically in the context--not just of needing to produce ID where it matters whether you are who you claim to be, but specifically in the context of voter ID, of having to produce identification at the moment you vote, at the place where you vote. Mr. President, 83 percent of American voters, in total, support voter ID, and that includes a whopping 71 percent of Democrat voters.

So this is neither Republican nor Democratic. This is neither liberal nor conservative. This is simply an American issue because we don't want anyone's right to vote to be taken away. We don't want anyone disenfranchised, and that is exactly what happens when you allow someone who is not whom they claim to be, who is not entitled to vote, to show up and cast a vote, and that is wrong. So today we have got a really good opportunity to address these two issues that Americans are deeply concerned about, and I hope we can take advantage of this opportunity.

Now, the vote on the House of Representatives' side of this bill-- like I say, it was just passed recently by the House of Representatives--it was bipartisan. You had Republicans overwhelmingly support it, but you also had a number of House Democrats voting with every House Republican in favor of this bill with the clean voter ID requirement attached.

So we are going to be talking about this for a little while tonight, and I just want to encourage my Democratic colleagues on this side of the Capitol right here in the U.S. Senate to follow the lead of the wise Democrats who joined every Republican to vote for this in the House of Representatives.

We need to get this done. We should get it done. We have the opportunity to get it done tonight, and we will be talking more about that in a moment.

Mr. President, we see a lot of debates around here on a lot of different topics--too many topics, in my view, given the fact that the Federal Government is a government enterprise with narrow responsibilities.

In Federalist 45, James Madison described the powers of the Federal Government as few and defined while describing those reserved to the States as numerous and indefinite.

We are in charge of national defense, weights and measures, trademarks, copyrights and patents, regulating trade or commerce between the States with foreign nations and with Tribes, bankruptcy laws, intellectual property laws, coastal roads, declaring war, granting letters of marque and reprisal, serving as the sole sovereign lawmaking authority for what we now call the District of Columbia, the city where we stand today. That is about it. There are a few other powers, but the lion's share of it can be found somewhere in that list of relatively limited authorities that I just described.

We venture sometimes too far afield from those powers, and that is one of the reasons why a lot of things come up.

My point in reciting all this is that in all the debates we see, which probably range further than they should, we see some things that are weighty and some things that are more on the trivial side. Just to cite one random hypothetical, one minute, you could see something debated and maybe passed on this floor recognizing, I don't know, National Sofa Care Week or something like that that goes by sort of with a yawn, and then the next moment, we will be debating something more weighty, something more significant and more definitely relevant to the U.S. Government's powers.

Under article I, sections 4 and 5, this legislation that we have been discussing this evening, H.R. 7008, deals with a couple of core powers that Congress has, one of them involving the regulation of behavior and activities on the part of Members of Congress, Members of the House and the Senate. In the second instance, you have the regulation of the casting of ballots for Federal elections--for elections for Federal office, elections for the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives. We certainly have authority to act in both of those two areas.

There is not a lot of dispute--in other words, there is a lot of bipartisan consensus over the fact that it is time to restrict stock buying and selling on the part of Members of Congress. It is stunning, however, that the voter ID component of H.R. 7008 is at all controversial. This one should be a no-brainer. For the American people, it is a no-brainer. Democratic voters--71 percent favor voter ID requirements. When you add Republicans--so Democrat voters and Republican voters combined--you take it up to 83, 84 percent. If you poll Republican voters alone, we are talking in the mid- to high-90 percentile range for people who support voter ID requirements.

The reason for this is simple. This is obvious. It is intuitive. It is just as we have to prove who we are everywhere else we go where who you are matters and whether you are who you claim to be can make a big difference.

Americans intuitively understand that whatever mild inconvenience might accompany having to provide documentation for who you are, when most of the time, that can be done with a simple card like a driver's license, for example, a passport, something like that, something showing who you are that is issued by the government--we have come to accept as a society that that is just sort of the cost of living in our country. That is part of what it takes because if we didn't do that, the alternative would be bad.

You don't want to show up to your bank one day and discover that somebody else impersonating you, falsely claiming to be you, came in and withdrew all of your money. You don't want that.

We don't allow people to board aircraft without a photo ID, and the reason is there are all kinds of things that can happen in the sky that are dangerous, and you don't want to make it too easy for somebody claiming to be who they are not to board an aircraft and then carry out, you know, crimes of one sort or another--acts of terrorism, perhaps.

These are just a couple examples of the myriad instances in which we have to prove who we are. It is not an undue burden; it is a momentary detour from what we would otherwise be doing.

Most of the time, most people, when they show up to vote, already have their wallet with them, and in their wallet, they presumably have a driver's license or another form of government-issued photo ID, so why not require them to show that?

We saw tonight my friend and colleague, the distinguished Senator from California, contorting himself into a pretzel trying to explain why it is we can't pass this bill. To be clear, his objection, as far I can tell, didn't relate nearly as much to anything else in the bill other than the voter ID provision. That is the concern.

The question is, Why is it that when 70 percent of Democrat voters and 83, 84 percent of all voters, Democrat and Republican combined--why is it that my Democrat colleagues are so adamantly opposed to this? Why do they care? Why do they want the status quo?

I am always reluctant to speak on someone else's behalf because what they say--No. 1, I don't have the ability to read minds, but sometimes, what they say can give us an indication. We have had Democratic politician after Democratic politician part from their own Democratic voter base, which overwhelmingly supports voter ID, time and time and time again, showing up and saying: Oh, we don't want voter ID.

Why?

Now, they actually say this: We believe this would shut out a lot of our voters.

What? Is that an admission that a lot of their voters aren't who they claim to be? that a lot of their voters perhaps aren't U.S. citizens and aren't eligible to vote?

This ought to be concerning to everyone. It ought to be concerning especially to Democrat voters, especially in States that have elected a Democrat Senator who is now opposing any and every sort of voter ID requirement.

A few months ago when we had the SAVE America Act on the floor for, I don't know, 10 blessed days--should have been longer, but it was on the floor for about 10 days. During that time, I was on the floor a lot responding to arguments that they made, and I think I heard every single argument they made.

The overwhelming majority of them--and I mean probably 95-plus percent of the arguments they made against the SAVE America Act-- weren't even against the voter ID provisions of the SAVE America Act. Overwhelmingly, they were instead about the proof of citizenship issue. In fact, many of them, Democratic Senator after Democratic Senator, intimated one way or another that they are OK with voter ID requirements. So why are they opposing it? You have to ask yourself that question.

In Latin, there is a word for this: ``Cui bono?'' Who benefits? Who benefits from people being able to show up and claim to be someone they are not or from someone showing up who is not entitled to vote because they are not a U.S. citizen? Who benefits from that?

I can tell you it is not Republicans. Why? Well, you don't see a single Republican politician making the ridiculous, absurd arguments against voter ID and citizenship verification that these guys are making. Who benefits from illegal voting? Their words seem to suggest that they are benefiting.

This issue isn't going away. The SAVE America Act isn't going away. Voter ID requirement demands aren't going away. I will be back. I will be back day after day, week after week, until this passes because the American people deserve to go to bed every night knowing that their government is run by people they themselves elected, not foreign nationals. They don't want a government that has been chosen with significant foreign influence in our elections.

There was a time when the Democrats in this august Chamber--a time not so very long ago indeed--spoke of little else other than their fear of foreign election interference.

If we don't face the real challenge as to foreign election interference right now, as long as we are not passing the SAVE America Act or its key components, it would appear that those who are against this are just fine now with foreign election interference.

The American people shouldn't be because, again, it is not free. When somebody else votes who is not who they claim to be, when somebody else votes claiming to be a citizen and they are not a citizen, it robs hard-working

Americans, actual American citizens, of their most sacred, their most fundamental right: their right to vote.

No. No. We can't look the other way, nor do we, in my view, have any business taking a 6-week recess until such time as we have done everything humanly possible to get these reforms put into law. The American people deserve better than this. Most of them don't have that luxury of doing that.

Now, I know it is a time-honored Senate tradition. I know it is a tradition that has its roots back to long before the advent of modern air-conditioning and to a time when Washington, DC--you know, it is typically not the most pleasant weather in Washington, and this Chamber, I am sure, became suffocatingly hot and muggy, so for a long time, we had that August recess. Well, we have air-conditioning now. We can handle it.

It is true we frequently do take a recess in August, but it is not written in stone anywhere, it is not written in law anywhere that we have to do that. I would be fine doing that if we had gotten our work done. I would be fine doing that if we knew how our government was going to be funded past September 30. Right now, we have no idea. So when the government remains unfunded and we have no idea how we are going to secure an election system that, quite frankly, is recklessly, criminally insecure--we have no business leaving this Chamber for 6 weeks when we have no idea how we are going to take care of any of that. These problems are not going to solve themselves while we are gone.

I remember 15 years ago when I was first sworn in. I was younger then. I had a full head of hair. I was only 39 years old. I was the youngest Member of the Senate when I got sworn in.

Right after I got sworn in, we were walking one evening around the Capitol. I was showing it to my family. My daughter Eliza was 10 years old at the time. She pointed to one of the little doors out in the hallway just outside the Senate Chamber.

It is a door that is maybe 18 inches tall at the most. I later learned that it was installed when they built this wing of the Capitol in the late 1850s. That was their source of water. They had a pipe in there. The custodial staff at the time used it to get water so that they could clean the floors. I didn't know that at the time.

As we were walking around, my 10-year-old daughter Eliza asked me: Dad, what is that door for?

Not knowing how to answer, I just said the first thing that came to mind. I said: Well, that is for the House elves. The House elves live in there.

Of course, there are no House elves here, but sometimes, we act as if we are relying on the House elves to not only clean the Capitol but also clean up the messes that we make and that we leave undealt with, unaddressed legislatively while we are gone. The cavalry is not coming. We are the cavalry. The House elves aren't going to show up and do our work for us if we retreat into the sunset for 6 weeks.

We have to do this. We had an opportunity tonight to make a meaningful dent in our election security problem. And it is tragic that the Democrats chose not to let this reasonable measure pass into law--a measure that 71 percent of their voters and 83 percent of all American voters support. They can't handle it--apparently because they benefit too much when people vote illegally. Shame on them for taking that position, but shame on us if we leave before the job is done.

Lastly, far too much gets said around here about, Oh, we can't do X, Y, or Z because we don't have 60 votes. I get that that is said. That cannot become our anthem. That is an absurd suggestion.

Now, I know it takes 60 votes to invoke cloture, but, you know, long before there even was a cloture rule--there has only been a cloture rule for 109 years. Before that time, we still had the filibuster, just no cloture. Remember, a cloture vote is just one way of breaking the filibuster.

If a supermajority of Senators--under the current rule, three-fifths, 60 votes in the Senate--if 60 Senators want to force debate to come to a close even if some Senators want to continue debating, then the Senate can do so, but that is not the exclusive means by which you can break a filibuster. Other techniques are available--techniques that were available for nearly 150 years before the first cloture rule was even adopted in 1917.

If you can't break a filibuster and you don't have 60 votes to bring debate to a close using cloture, you can put legislation on the floor, and you can debate it, and you can require any Senator wishing to filibuster to continue to show up and continue to speak to prolong debate.

The filibuster is about speaking; it is about debating; it is not about perpetually forestalling the passing of legislation until you have 60 votes for it.

Passage in this Chamber, with rare exceptions not relevant here, is set at a simple majority, at 51 votes. And if the Vice President is with you, you can do it at 50 votes. The Vice President supplies the tie-breaking vote of 51, and then it is passed. We could do that.

We should be putting this measure on the Senate floor. We should be debating it for weeks on end, if necessary, cutting into weekends and long-scheduled recess time, if necessary, making clear we are going to keep debating it until it passes, and making clear that the minute those filibustering it fail to show up and continue to speak, we will call the question, and we will pass it with a simple majority.

We could do that. We should do that. It takes time, yes. But time is on our side. We have got weeks in which to do this. We should do that.

Now, if we don't want to do that, there are other mechanisms available to us. We could continue to attach it to other must-pass vehicles. We could also push something in the form of budget reconciliation.

Now, that is a little trickier. You could bypass the need for cloture with budget reconciliation, but it has to be budgetary, and it has to meet a whole bunch of requirements.

It has to be budgetary, which means it needs to manage changes in mandatory outlays or revenues; and it can't, among other things, have budgetary features that are merely incidental to policy changes.

But there are ways that we could capture some of the benefits of the SAVE America Act through reconciliation.

But my point is just to say there are multiple ways of skinning this cat. I don't care nearly as much which way to skin it. I would personally prefer to bring it up on the floor and debate it until it passes. I think that is the cleanest way of doing it. But I am not a purist on that. I don't insist it be my way or the highway. I am just saying we do have to do it. We can't pretend this isn't here. This will not disappear simply because we leave.

The cavalry is not coming. We are the cavalry. There are no house elves who will come and fix our election security problems. So let's get this done. And for the love of all that is sacred and holy, let's not go on a 6-week recess with all of this undone. The American people deserve better.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate resume 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 the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 818, which is at the desk.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, 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 ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it stand adjourned until 10 a.m. on Thursday, July 30; that following the prayer and pledge, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the morning hour be deemed expired, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, morning business be closed, and the Senate proceed to executive session to resume consideration of Executive Calendar No. 6, S. Res. 817, with no amendments or motions in relation to the executive resolution in order; further, that notwithstanding rule XXII, Senator Murray or her designee be authorized to return the Senate to legislative session for the purpose of making a motion to proceed to Calendar No. 533, S.J. Res. 199, and the Senate vote on the motion to proceed at 11:30 a.m.; further, that if Senator Gillibrand or her designee makes a motion to discharge S.J. Res. 181, while the Senate is in legislative session, the Senate vote on the motion to discharge immediately following disposition of S.J. Res. 199, and the Senate resume executive session; further, that at 1:45 p.m., the Senate vote on adoption of the resolution; finally, if S. Res. 817 is adopted, that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table and the Senate resume legislative session.

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

Mr. President, imagine your shock if, while on your way to the theater, let's say--I don't know--maybe you are going to the opera. You are planning to pick up your tickets at will call. You arrive at will call at the appointed moment and say: Yes, I am Senator Pete Ricketts. I am here to pick up my opera tickets.

They gave them to somebody else.

If you found out that the theater was handing out tickets at will call without any form of ID, you would probably be a little disappointed--you or any

other American, any other human in that circumstance--realizing that it is important to find out whether you are who you claim to be before you are given something, something where your identity matters.

The same could be said of a whole bunch of other human transactions, ordinary human interactions involving day-to-day transactions that any of us could be expected to engage in multiple times every single week. One day, maybe it is theater or opera tickets. Maybe the next day, it is withdrawing money from a bank.

You show up, and money is gone from your account because your bank stopped requiring people to show ID. They can come along and claim to be someone they are not and take someone's money that is not theirs.

The mere fact that we have a lot of people that are allowed to vote doesn't diminish the seriousness of not requiring people to prove that they are, in fact, who they claim to be when they show up to exercise that important right.

Some people, when denying that there is any need for us to act here, will throw up things and say: Well, that is fine for the bank or for theater tickets or for the pharmacy. But this is an important constitutional right. It is a fundamental right.

My response to that is: Yes, exactly--and that is exactly why we need it.

The fact that it involves a protected, fundamental constitutional right is a reason why we need to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. That is exactly what the SAVE America Act does. It is exactly what it would do.

When I set out, about 3 years ago, to write this bill, along with my partner in the House, Congressman Chip Roy from Texas, that was our mantra: Let's make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.

Never, at the time, could we have predicted how much attention this would get, and never, at the time, could we have predicted the absurdity of the arguments that would be raised against this because, if you are careful--if you listen carefully--what you will find is that there is not a legitimate argument against the Senate passing the SAVE America Act--no, not even one. The arguments that you will hear against it, over and over and over again, are based entirely on contrivance, on pretext, on false statements and false assumptions.

Look, at the end of the day, the SAVE America Act is about reestablishing, restoring trust in U.S. elections. That trust needs to be restored, especially in light of the facts that we have discovered just over the last few days.

As of just Friday, the Department of Homeland Security announced that there are 278,000--that is over a quarter of a million--noncitizens registered to vote in U.S. elections in just four States alone. This doesn't count all of them. This is 278,000 noncitizen votes, just in the States of California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada

Now, that is a problem. When you add to that the other States that have refused to cooperate, that have made it very difficult for us to ascertain how many noncitizen votes they might have registered in their States--they are not cooperating. That is one of many problems that we face here.

Fortunately, this is a problem that Congress can solve. It is a problem that it can solve and, therefore, must solve.

Among those who make an argument against this, sometimes, you will hear the argument--one that I find especially galling and especially disingenuous--that, ``oh, this somehow tramples on the authority of the States,'' which some mistakenly refer to as States' rights.

I don't call them States' rights. States don't have rights. They have authority. A right is a privilege against the exercise of authority. It is the inverse polar opposite of a right; therefore, I don't call it States' rights. It is State authority.

This, Mr. President, emphatically does not trample on State authority. How do we know that? Well, because the Constitution delineates the relative responsibilities of the States and the Federal Government. And in one particularly poignant and relevant provision-- article I, section 4--the elections clause of that provision states that Congress may, at any time, by law, make or alter what we will loosely describe as laws establishing the time, place, and manner in which Federal elections will take place, except as to places of choosing Senators.

So we have the authority to do this under the Constitution, not as to State races but as to Federal races, principally U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate races. We have that authority; article I, section 4 gives that to us.

Moreover, if those who mistakenly argue that this somehow tramples on State sovereign authority, if there were any doubt about that, which there is not because article I, section 4 puts that issue to bed quite nicely. But if there were, then the entire predicate of existing law, making the SAVE America Act necessary in the first place, would also be invalid. Every time I hear this argument made, I wish, like anything, that those same people making this argument would acknowledge that if the SAVE America Act is somehow unconstitutional, so, too, is the National Voter Registration Act.

The National Voter Registration Act enacted by Congress in 1993 created a system whereby people can vote at a DMV in their home State. Now, when somebody goes into a DMV to register to vote in that State, all they have to do is check a box saying: Yes, I am applying for a driver's license, but I would like, simultaneously, to register to vote with this application. After all, you have got some of the same features there. You have got to prove your identity. You have got to establish your residency, what your address is. And so it made a certain amount of sense to provide this option for American voters to go and register at a DMV.

The problem is that that is all you have to do, is check a box saying: I would like to register to vote. And then at the end of it, you sign your name in a conclusory statement to the effect that I am entitled to vote; I am a U.S. citizen, and I am not prohibited, for one reason or another, from voting, and so I am allowed to do it. But that is all the verification that is allowed.

And in a move that, I believe, is incompatible with the text and original understanding of the statutory language, the Supreme Court-- about 20 years after the NVRA was passed, the Supreme Court of the United States interpreted the NVRA, mistakenly but nonetheless conclusively, as prohibiting the States from doing anything to verify the citizenship of someone registering to vote at a DMV using an NVRA- supplied form.

Now, the Supreme Court was wrong. Justice Alito explained in his dissent in that case--Inter Tribal Counsel v. Arizona why that was wrong. Nonetheless, it remains the conclusive interpretation of the NVRA, and it is why the SAVE America Act is necessary because what we have got now, Mr. President, we have got an estimated 30 million-plus noncitizens residing in the United States. We have got a system of laws under the NVRA that makes it really easy to go into a DMV and fill out some forms, check a box and sign your name and say I want to register to vote. That is how we got 278,000 registered voters who are noncitizens just in those four States alone: California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada, to say nothing of the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of others in other States who may have done the same thing.

It is phenomenally easy to cheat. It is stunningly easy to register to vote as a noncitizen, in some cases, without really realizing what you are doing, much less that you are committing a very serious felony offense by doing that.

So that is the whole reason why the SAVE America Act is necessary, is because of the NVRA and, specifically, the Supreme Court's butchered interpretation of it prohibiting the States, even where they have actual doubts, from asking someone to verify their citizenship at the time they register to vote.

So, if the SAVE America Act is unconstitutional, then so, too, is the NVRA, in which case, we don't need it--at least not nearly to the same degree as we do. But, of course, neither the NVRA nor the SAVE America Act is unconstitutional; they are both squarely within the authority provided to the U.S. Congress under article I, section 4 of the Constitution.

So, as a result of all this, it is clear that Congress can fix this problem. We have the authority to do it. So what is the holdup? Well, it certainly isn't the

American voter because the American voter, by a margin of like 3 out of 4 or 4 out of 5, depending which poll you look at, believes that it is important that people who show up to vote ought to have to prove who they are. And they ought to, at the time they register to vote, have to establish their citizenship and, thus, their eligibility to vote in the first place. We are talking about 75 to 80--some as high as 85 percent, depending on which poll that you look at. Those are Democrat voters and Republican voters alike, all agreeing that this is a problem, and it is a problem that Congress can and should fix. So what is the holdup?

Well, it is hard to say what the holdup is? But I can summarize it this way: It is Senate Democrats. The SAVE America Act is popular literally everywhere in the United States of America, except in this Chamber and except among Democrats in this Chamber. Everywhere else it is a no-brainer. Everywhere else it is popular. It is only here that they don't want to pass it.

Why? Why don't they want to pass it? Well, one could argue that if you benefit from the status quo, you don't want any change to that status quo, especially if you benefit from it in a way that is likely to go away if you change the status quo. These are all fancy ways, Mr. President--nice ways--of saying: Perhaps some of those who are opposed to it might be afraid of what happens if they are not allowed to rely on noncitizen votes, even though Federal law flatly prohibits noncitizen voting in U.S. elections. That is not a good reason to oppose this. It may be a reason, but it is not a good reason. It is not a valid reason. It is not a legal, moral, ethical, or constitutional reason. It is just a reason, but that is about where the reason stops because every other of their arguments cannot withstand scrutiny.

For example, a number of them will say things like the following: If we pass the SAVE America Act into law, there will be anarchy, there will be lawlessness, dogs and cats living together in the streets, Book of Revelations stuff, apocalyptic nightmares unfolding everywhere. And they back this up by arguing, quite absurdly, that women and minorities will be unable to vote--oh, and also rural Americans and also young Americans and also older Americans because, at any given moment, these same people who are opposing the SAVE America Act--the 47 people in this Chamber, more or less--those are the same people who may stand to benefit if we don't pass it because the status quo benefits them. And they should not be able to benefit from this by not passing something.

The effect is that if this were to pass, this wouldn't disenfranchise anyone. Why? Well, because the kind of proof that we require--proof of citizenship and proof of identity--it is based on the same sort of document that every American has to provide routinely in the most mundane, routine encounters.

Let's break them up into two pieces. Remember, there are two pieces of the SAVE America Act. Part 1 deals with establishing citizenship. Part 2 deals with voter ID.

Let's deal first with the proof of citizenship. When you show up to register to vote, if this were to pass into law today--which it should pass today. It is that popular with the American people, and it is that lacking in any legitimate argument against it. If it were to pass into law today, then your existing voter registration would remain valid indefinitely. Nothing about that would change.

It would only be that the next time you have to register to vote-- because you have moved or something like that--then you would have to show up, and you would have to provide some type of proof as to U.S. citizenship. The law would allow you to do this using the same exact documentation that every single American has to supply every single time he or she starts a new job as a new employee with a new employer. You fill out an I-9 form, as every man, woman, and child in America has to do every time they start a new job as a new employee. You have got to fill that out, and you have got to provide proof of citizenship, and you do that either by showing a U.S. passport evidencing citizenship or, alternatively, an original copy of your birth certificate, coupled with a couple of other documents, including I think a Social Security card and/or a government-issued photo ID.

Those who argue against it argue, among other things, well, this will disenfranchise women because--at least married women who have changed their name after getting married, taking on their husband's last name, this would disenfranchise them because they won't be able to vote. By that logic, that would suggest that married women who have changed their name after getting married, which, I think, the last time I checked is most women in America, would also be unable to work. They would be unable to get a job. They would be unable lawfully to start a new job as a new employee for a new employer ever if their parents didn't have the clairvoyance to be able to guess, at the time of their birth, what their husband's--their future husband's last name would be 20 or 30 years in advance. Of course, this is absurd. This doesn't exist. This is an entirely contrived concern. And moreover, in this and every other area where this kind of argument comes up, the people making the argument ignore the text accompanying lines--beginning on page 12 of the House-passed SAVE America Act, line 20 and the text that follows from it, makes clear that even if you can't find any of your own documentation, whether it is because you never had it to begin with or your dog ate it or your crazy Aunt Madge raided the stash of family documents and burned it--I don't know. For whatever reason, if you don't have, never had, can't find your proof of citizenship, the SAVE America Act has you covered. You turn to that text accompanying line 20, starting on page 12 of the SAVE America Act as passed by the House of Representatives and it makes clear, even if you can't find any of that documentation, you can by a personal attestation write down the basic facts supporting or giving rise to your citizenship, and the burden then shifts to the State registering you to vote to confirm or refute your assertion as to citizenship: I was born on such and such a date in this American city to parents A and B. They are both citizens, so I was a citizen also. Or if you are a naturalized citizen, not a natural-born citizen, you would state the terms and conditions, the date or date range when you were naturalized, and the basis that you used to become a U.S. citizen; and the burden would then shift to the State to confirm or refute your characterization.

So those arguments reveal that people who are arguing against this, in addition to already being very wrong that this somehow tramples on State sovereign authority, that this somehow amounts to an improper or unconstitutional Federal takeover of election law, which has long been the more or less semi-exclusive domain of the States, that that doesn't hold up; neither does the ``you are going to disenfranchise all married women who have taken on their husband's name,'' that doesn't fly either.

There are other arguments about how it disenfranchises this or that racial group or urban Americans, rural Americans, old Americans, young Americans. They all fall for similarly self-evident reasons because at the end of the day, this law really does make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.

All right. So we have covered that step 1--step 1 of the citizenship verification part. Future voter registrations, when you show up to register newly to vote, you would have to provide proof of citizenship using the same documentation that you use every time you ever start a new job. And if you don't have that, you can do it just through a personal attestation, which you swear on a simple affidavit, outlining the facts and circumstances that make you a citizen, shifting the burden to the State.

SAVE America also gives authority to Federal officials to require the States--many of which are refusing to cooperate right now--to share their voter registration files so they can routinely help them scrub those voter registration files, to remove people who were illegally added as voters because, again, Federal law prohibits noncitizens from voting in U.S. elections.

That leads to the next line of argument frequently used by those who want to hinder the SAVE America Act's path toward victory. They make these stunning--astounding--claims that we don't need it. We don't need it. Why? Well, because it is already illegal to vote.

This has to be one of the dumbest arguments I have ever heard, and I have been here 15\1/2\ years in the U.S. Senate. I have heard some dumb arguments. This might well be the dumbest one that I have ever heard-- not just against this bill but against any bill--that because X is already illegal, we don't need any law making sure that the law making action X illegal is, in fact, enforceable.

That is the dumbest argument ever. It is like saying: We don't need traffic police to enforce the law because it is already illegal to go too fast or to run a stop sign.

If you leave in place no mechanism, no means by which those laws can be enforced, then those laws quickly become dead letter. I will get more into that in a moment as to the enforceability point.

But the fact that we have got an existing law that makes it illegal is a reason to pass the SAVE America Act; it is not a reason not to pass the SAVE America Act.

Look, for a long time, Americans have been told a number of lies. Among other things, they have been told that, you know, noncitizens don't vote in U.S. elections because they can't. We know that is not true. We have got documented instances where some have voted.

We have now got documented instances where 278,000 people, who are not citizens, registered to vote in just these four States: California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada--to say nothing of the tens or hundreds of thousands of others in other States who may be similarly situated.

But for years, Americans have been told to stop asking questions about all kinds of things. Trust the system, we were told. Trust the experts. Trust the machines. Trust the machine itself.

If you expressed concern about election security, at least between the years of--I don't know--2020 through 2026, you were told that you had no credibility, and you were dismissed as a conspiracy theorist.

The reason I frame the date range as I did is that if you were saying this back in 2016 or 2017, you weren't dismissed by the mainstream news media, by the radical left news establishment in this country. You weren't dismissed as that. Why? Well, because that is what Democrats were arguing and the mainstream news media is, of course, the communication apparatus of the Democratic National Committee. So the dates matter.

If you questioned the vulnerabilities in electronic voting systems, you were told that there were none and that you were an evil person for suggesting that a voting machine could ever be abused.

If you worried about foreign interference in elections, you were accused of undermining democracy itself--ignoring, of course, the fact that we are not a democracy; we are a constitutional republic. Yes, the difference matters. I won't elaborate as to why now, but it does.

Many of the same government Agencies that have spent years insisting that there is nothing to worry about, they quietly produced intelligence at the exact same time they were denying that there was any problem. They were quietly producing intelligence saying exactly the opposite.

According to newly declassified assessments released by the White House, our own intelligence community has concluded that Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and even nonstate actors possessed the capability to compromise American election infrastructure.

These assessments specifically identified voter registration databases, electronic pollbooks, and election websites as the most vulnerable targets.

According to the White House, Communist China acquired approximately 220 million American voter registration files, including names, addresses, phone numbers, political affiliations. This, of course, is enough information for them to be able to build detailed profiles of nearly every American voter and--while building profiles--figuring out what might sway those who are swayable, who they might be able to sway and how they might be able to do it.

The intelligence reportedly says Beijing created an entire unit dedicated to exploiting that data. Now, look, if China hacked the personnel files of the Pentagon, this Chamber would be in an uproar. We would hear of little else. If China stole the banking information of 220 million Americans, Congress would cancel its recess. It would do nothing until it had solved the problem.

But, somehow, we are expected to just shrug our shoulders and do nothing when they target the American voter, when they target that which is most uniquely, sacredly given to American citizens. The exclusive right to vote, as an American citizen, is the quintessential ingredient. It is the telltale sign. It is the ``without which, not,'' the ``sine qua non'' of the American citizenship experience.

And we are supposed to just ignore it because they targeted the American voter? No, sir, not on my watch. We are not going to just ignore that. We cannot. Consistent with our oath to uphold, protect, and defend the Constitution--which every one of us has taken the same oath in this Chamber--we can't simply ignore it.

Now the White House has released intelligence describing how the Maduro regime in Venezuela allegedly developed methods to manipulate electronic vote totals in ways that are designed to carry out the job, while simultaneously evading detection, even after an audit.

The point is that hostile governments are actively developing ways to do precisely that. Responsible governments prepare for threats before they become catastrophes. They don't just wait until after they happen and say: Oh, shoot, sorry--especially when it is something as important as maintaining the integrity--real and perceived--of our voting systems.

All you have to have is one truly botched election, and it could be very difficult to unscramble that egg, to put that genie back in the bottle. Sorry to throw too many metaphors in there at once, but the point is that you can't undo what happens when somebody uses their own technological sophistication to take advantage of vulnerabilities-- known vulnerabilities--in our election security system. So a responsible government does not wait until after that happens.

Some of these same documents that have been released by the White House also described a photo registration investigation in Michigan. According to FBI records, canvassers admitted to signing other people's names to register to vote, to submitting registrations for people who didn't exist, to receiving gift cards based on how many applications for voter registration they produced.

Now the FBI believed crimes had occurred; yet the investigation sat. It sat and it sat and then it sat some more. And the American people deserve an answer.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, approximately 278,000 noncitizens were identified on the voter rolls in just those 4 States that I mentioned--in California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada--4 States, not 50. We don't even know how many others there are in other States because a whole bunch of States--mostly blue ones-- utterly refused to share their records.

Even knowing that this is a problem--especially knowing that it is a problem--what does that say about those States and about those election officials who refused to share information with those elements within our government that are there to do one job, which is just to make sure that we don't have illegal voting occurring? What does that say about them? What does that say about the need for the SAVE America Act?

Now, given what we have learned from President Trump and from the Department of Homeland Security--just in the last few days--we must pass the SAVE America Act. If you were on the fence on it before, that is one thing. I don't know how anybody could even be on the fence about it after learning that information shared by President Trump and by the Department of Homeland Security late last week.

Meanwhile, opponents to this legislation are doubling down, and they keep repeating the same lie: Noncitizen voting is illegal, so we don't need this.

Exactly. Now robbery is illegal. We still lock the bank, and we still hire a night watchman. Identity theft is already illegal. Yeah, well, we still verify identities. Fraud is illegal. We still investigate fraud. And we have all kinds of laws and all kinds of law enforcement personnel assigned to do things

to make it more difficult for people to defraud their fellow citizens.

No serious person believes that declaring something illegal in and of itself eliminates the need to enforce the law--especially whereas here the law itself is written, it has been interpreted by the courts conclusively in a way that makes it impossible to enforce.

The SAVE America Act closes that gap. It makes it possible to enforce the law. It requires proof of citizenship to register to vote in Federal elections.

The reason this bears mention is because States do have the power--I don't know why any State would want to do this. States do have it within their discretion to allow noncitizens to vote. There are a small handful of local jurisdictions that have done that.

I cannot for the life of me fathom why that would be a good idea any more than any corporation would see fit to have nonshareholders vote in shareholder elections, nondirectors vote on a matter considered for a vote in a board of directors. You don't do that.

Citizenship has to mean something, and citizenship means, first and foremost, that you have got the right to participate in this body politic in our system of government in the United States, and you can't have that stripped away from you.

Well, there are many ways that it could be stripped away from you. One of the most common, pedestrian, and overlooked ways in which you can have that stripped is by having your vote offset, by having it nullified, neutralized.

In other words, if you vote and if at the same time somebody down the street from you is voting, who is not supposed to vote, that person has diluted your vote. That person has cheapened what it means to you to be a citizen. And they may have completely offset, neutralized, and nullified your vote. That is not acceptable. It requires proof of citizenship to register to vote in Federal elections.

And then we get to step 2 of it. Step 2 of the SAVE America Act is just about the voter ID. After you verified citizenship with a new voter registration, after you have had the coordination process occurring between Federal officials--the Department of Homeland Security who run the SAVE database and the States--then you get to the step 2 of the SAVE America Act where you just require people, the day they vote, to show up and provide a valid photo ID in order to prove that they are who they say they are.

This is nothing radical. This is nothing extraordinary. This is nothing that millions of Americans don't already do every single day to board an airplane, to cash a check, enter a Federal building, pick up a prescription, go to the doctor, pick up tickets at will call, or do any of a whole host of other things.

Many of us were at airports across America today. I boarded a plane this morning in Salt Lake City. When I boarded that plane, there were hundred--thousands, in fact--of people wanting to get on an airplane. Every one of them had to prove who they were. They had to prove their identity. Not one of them, while doing so, was saying: Gosh, I am being disenfranchised--while doing it.

They understand that this is part of what we have to do, that there are times in life when you have got--where who you are matters and whether you are who you claim to be really matters. This is one of those moments.

And, again, the American people overwhelmingly agreed because it is just common sense. Mr. President, 83 percent, according to one poll, support voter ID. That is among all registered voters. Among just Republicans, that number jumps as high as 95 percent. I don't know who those remaining 5 percent were among Republicans who said they don't think you ought to have to have that.

My guess is that a significant percentage of them meant to answer the question the other way. And another significant percentage of those 5 percent are probably actually Democrats who just wrongly identified as Republicans for one reason or another. But this is still a minimum of 71 percent of Democrat voters who believe this is a good idea.

The only people who find this controversial in any significant numbers are right here, Democrats in the U.S. Senate.

So here is the question before the Senate: If hostile foreign governments are targeting our election systems, and they are; if China possesses hundreds of millions of American voter files, and it does; if the overwhelming majority of Americans support voter ID, and they do, then what exactly are we waiting for? What is it that is so critical, that is so essential, that is so timely, that is so time-sensitive that we are not debating this right now? Why don't we pull this bill up right now and debate it and announce that we are going to debate it until it passes?

If we were to do that, it would pass. It might take us a few days, it might take us a few weeks, but it would pass because the same animating desire, the smell of jet fumes, would eventually work its will, work its magic, and put our Members into a state of intoxication or sanity, regardless of how you might perceive it, where they would eventually negotiate this thing to the point that they could accept it because they know that with every passing day, when they filibuster this, this bill gets more popular and they get less popular. If you add to that the fact that they shouldn't be able to go home until we are finished with this--none of us should. If we were truly doing our job here, then the 60-vote cloture standard wouldn't be perceived as the insuperable obstacle that it has been described wrongly as being here today.

For a very long time, this Chamber operated without so much as a cloture rule--even after the cloture rule was adopted in 1917 for the first time. Still, breaking a filibuster usually didn't involve a cloture vote. Most of the time, it just meant the Senate would come in and say: OK. We are debating this bill until it passes. If you want to filibuster it, you are going to have to speak. If you stop speaking and nobody else shows up to speak against it, then we will call the question, and we will do so in a simple majority vote.

It is only in the modern Senate that we have gotten our entire bearings wrong on what the filibuster is. Its whole purpose is to facilitate and prolong robust, meaningful debate--the modern filibuster, in which we look at it as a simple vote-counting exercise. Unless you can count to 60 on day one of a bill's consideration, you consider it failed. It is not just that it doesn't amplify it; it doesn't further the purpose of the filibuster. It undermines its very purpose. Rather than protecting robust debate, that renders debate obsolete.

Shame on us if we can't see that. Shame on us if we don't take the steps necessary to extricate ourselves from the sharp, clinging talons of the so-called zombie filibuster--the name I have assigned for the use of the 60-vote cloture standard as a de facto 60-vote passage standard, which it is not, which it was never meant to be, which, if it were, it would arguably run afoul of the Constitution because the Constitution makes clear--when you are setting a supermajority threshold as the minimum standard, it makes clear where that is.

There are several instances--including when you are proposing a constitutional amendment, you are ratifying a treaty, trying to overcome a Presidential veto, for example--where a two-thirds supermajority is required. Otherwise, it is a simple majority. And that continues to be the case under the Senate rules today. It is just that we think of the 60-vote cloture standard as synonymous with the threshold needed to pass. It is not.

The reason we talk about this, the reason I contrast what I call the real filibuster, the talking filibuster, against the zombie filibuster is that in the case of the zombie filibuster, nobody even has to work for it.

The way it always worked before and after they first adopted the cloture standard for the first time in 1917--although it was set at a three-fourths supermajority back then--they would just continue to debate it. That is what we should do here.

If you want to filibuster, you can. You may do so. But you should have to stand here and speak. And when nobody else shows up to speak against it, that is over, and you call the question on the bill, and you call it not at 60 votes, you call it at 51. That is what we ought to be doing. We should put this bill on the floor, and we should debate it until such time as it passes.

Now, are there other options? Heck yeah, there are, and I support pretty

much all of them. One option would be to attach it to a continuing resolution or a spending vehicle. Another would be to attach it, as the House of Representatives has done, to the National Defense Authorization Act.

When we received the National Defense Authorization Act that was passed by the House of Representatives last week, the Senate refused to bring it up. They refused to bring up even the Senate committee- processed version. They refused to give what we call front-end cloture or cloture on the motion to proceed.

See, this illustrates the problem I am pointing to. We are now into, what, our third, fourth instance of prominent pieces of legislation this year that have been unable to pass. Remember how the Department of Homeland Security was at least partially defunded for many months out of this fiscal year? The same thing happened there--we couldn't get the 60 votes, so we kept punting it.

What we should do every time that happens, just as it happened yesterday--or last week when we tried to get on the Defense Authorization Act--Democrats didn't vote for it, so we couldn't get the 60 votes on it. We should have continued trying to debate it and announced that we would stay on it until we could get the 60.

But regardless, even if you don't do that with a large bill like the National Defense Authorization Act, you should do it with a small, simple, overwhelmingly popular bill like the SAVE America Act. It would work. It would work. But we have to do the hard work to do it.

All right. So we have talked about attaching it to a spending bill or a defense authorization bill or some other must-pass vehicle. Another option under consideration involves budget reconciliation. Budget reconciliation has the obvious advantage in that there is no cloture in the context of budget reconciliation, but it has to be budgetary, meaning it has to bring about changes to mandatory outlays or to revenues.

Well, the SAVE America Act itself as a whole is properly perceived as a policy bill, not a budgetary one. There are features, there are elements of the SAVE America Act that are themselves arguably budgetary or at least could be made such in a budget reconciliation vehicle, and I look forward to working on that as well.

One way or another, we have to get this done. The American people are asking us to act. The President has asked us to act. The only thing standing in the way of this bill passing is the Senate and specifically our slavish devotion to the zombie filibuster. But, really, our slavish devotion to the zombie filibuster is not about the zombie filibuster or any kind of filibuster at all; it is slavish devotion to the truncated, predictable, light-duty legislative workweek. It is that coupled with the cloture standard that has created the modern zombie filibuster mess in which our Democrat colleagues were able to keep the Department of Homeland Security at least partially defunded for months and months out of the year.

Now they want to use the same trick to make sure that our elections are not secure. Shame on them. Shame on all of them. Shame on anyone who is trying to do that.

For that matter, now that it has become abundantly clear that we have identified 278,000 noncitizen voter registrations just in those four States alone--California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York--I challenge those who are not yet on board with the SAVE America Act to come up with something else that will fix the problem because it is no longer an excuse--it is no longer acceptable to simply ignore it. We know too much now. We can't ignore this problem. If you don't like the way we have written this, tell us what your alternative is, but doing nothing is not an option.

So, look, we have been told meanwhile that there simply isn't enough time to debate SAVE America Act until it passes. Sorry. We would love to, but we can't.

I am sorry, this falls on deaf ears. This is absurd. To whatever degree we do not have time, it is because we are choosing not to give it the time that it needs, that it deserves, that it requires. And shame on all of us for betraying our oath to the Constitution and our own commitment to our own voters. We are expected to look out for them, to defend them, to respect them enough.

We have to give a crap--just enough of a crap in order to tell our voters, to say: We are not going to allow your vote to be offset by someone who is voting illegally.

That is the least we can do.

After this week, under the current schedule, the House and the Senate won't both simultaneously be back into session in the Capitol until-- wait for it--September 14. Mid-September. This is the last week, absent some change in the respective Chambers' meeting schedules, the last legislative week until mid-September, which will take us to just--what is that?--6 weeks before the November election? That is unacceptable.

We don't have a lack of time; we have a lack of spine. Don't ever confuse lack of time with lack of spine because they are two very different things. If we truly lack time, that would be one thing. We have time. We are just choosing not to use it. We are choosing to use it differently and, I would add, very poorly if we don't take this up. Take it up now and stay on the bill until it darn well passes.

The Senate should stay here tomorrow, this weekend, next week, through weekends and long-scheduled recesses--as long as it takes. If opponents want to block it, let them do it in public. If Democrats want to filibuster this bill, let them stand and speak like actual Senators actually filibustering because that is what filibustering is. If they don't show up to do that, then we call the question, we call the vote, and we do so with a simple majority because that is what our rules allow us to do with votes when they don't filibuster. But you can't have the benefit of filibustering if you are not willing to filibuster.

Let them, as they are filibustering, explain why they are insisting that proving citizenship is somehow unreasonable in elections that are reserved for U.S. citizens. Let them explain why showing voter ID is simply too much to ask even though Americans show that they are comfortable showing ID in countless everyday interactions.

The American people are watching, and they should be. They know that this is not about Republicans. It is not about Democrats. This isn't about the last election or the one before that. No, this one is about the next election and every election that comes after that. It is about the future. It is about whether the American people can stand and look at our election systems and have the confidence they need when they lawfully cast their ballots. They need to be able to stand with a degree of confidence that their ballot, their vote won't be canceled by fraud, diluted by ineligible voting, or jeopardized by a system that Washington spent years insisting was beyond reasonable debate when, in fact, it was not.

American elections belong to American citizens. The SAVE America Act would make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.

We must pass the SAVE America Act. If we fail to do so, neither history nor today's voters will smile upon us.

I am now happy to turn the time over to my friend and colleague, the distinguished Senator from Ohio.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to engage in colloquy.

Whether you call it hypocrisy and inconsistency or something else, it can't be reconciled with what they themselves have done.

Now, I have got a copy right here of a significant portion of that bill, the bill offered up by the Senate Democrats in 2021 during the 117th Congress--the so-called For the People Act. I mean, what is not to like if you are for the people? And if you are against that, apparently, you are against the people. Maybe we should have thought of that when we named the SAVE America Act. But, regardless, that horse is out of the barn.

This is a part of that bill, and it is the specific part of the bill in subtitle 1, section 1709 that requires voter ID.

You see, the Democrats themselves had their own voter ID act, their own voter ID legislation. This is not State legislation; this is right here in this Chamber. They wanted to pass their own voter ID law.

Now, theirs is a little different than ours. Theirs is a little bit more permissive. They allow all sorts of other things, like--depending on how you read it, you could argue that a library card without your picture on it would even suffice under this. I wouldn't draw it quite like that, but the point is they were going to do something to require voter ID.

Even though we might draw the boundaries a little bit differently than they do--and we, in fact, do in ours--they were doing the very same thing that they are now condemning us for doing because, if the SAVE America Act is commandeering a State issue on the part of the Federal Government, then so, too, was the For the People Act. If it is wrong to have--and if it is disenfranchisement to require--voter ID, then theirs does that, too. It is just that ours is well written. Theirs was a little bit sloppy. But, you know, it was a step, maybe, in the right direction.

The point is, they have no leg to stand on when claiming that the Federal Government has no business doing this. Why? Well, because, first of all, it flatly contradicts article I, section 4 of the Constitution, which plainly does give us that authority to operate within the space as it relates to Federal elections. And, secondly, this is something they themselves have already done.

Yes.

I think that is right.

There is a part of me that is now tempted to seek to pass by unanimous consent at least that portion of the SAVE America Act that consists of a voter ID law because they themselves have said, over and over again, that they have got no problems with voter ID laws until, of course, they do have a problem with them.

Yes. As Cicero once said on the floor of the Roman Senate: If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice--actually, that wasn't Cicero; it was Rush in the song ``Freewill.''

But the point was made: When you are aware of something and you do nothing about it, that, by itself, is a decision.

They have identified that this is an issue. And by suggesting that we move forward while doing nothing about it, that--there is an inexorable, inescapable conclusion that one derives from that, which is: They are just fine with this form of cheating. They are just fine with the very real possibility that up to 278,000 noncitizens, in those 4 States alone that we mentioned--to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands in other States that might be registered to vote illegally-- that those guys are going to vote. They are just fine with that. Let that sink in.

There is a justification. The justification goes something like this: Those people who might be purged from this because they are noncitizens and therefore not legally registered to vote are our voters, meaning Democrat voters.

They wouldn't make that case if they were committed to the rule of law, and yet they have made the case. We have heard them do it.

Some of them, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, have said: These are our voters.

I don't know whether that was a Freudian slip, but I have heard it made several times where they say: These are our voters who would be at stake here--and then they go on about disenfranchisement.

This disenfranchises no one unless it is a noncitizen who is illegally voting based on a fraudulent voter registration.

It certainly is possible. And I wonder--I mean, we will have a separate conversation off the floor. I am trying to wonder which words in Spanish they uttered. I am trying to imagine them saying something like: Has this guy lost his mind? After he moved to the United States when he was 8 years old, he has now adopted the ways of North America and he has lost it.

Perhaps there is something about the tropical climate of Colombia that causes them to make more sense there, but perhaps you have lost your sense now that you have moved to Ohio? Perhaps the rationale?

Senator Moreno, which party was the party of Jim Crow?

Mr. President, just a brief comment as we wrap up our conversation for this evening. Moments ago, we heard my friend and colleague, the Senator from Ohio, talk about identifying--the need for people to identify themselves. He talked about the fact that he, on one recent occasion, started looking for his photo ID and couldn't find it.

And yet he has one. Even as he stands here today, he has got a pin on his lapel. That pin signifies that he is

a U.S. Senator. So that, by itself, identifies who he is.

Long before he got here, he had to prove that he was a U.S. citizen and that he was otherwise eligible to run for the U.S. Senate. When he ran for the Senate in the State of Ohio, he had to provide that documentation to the elections personnel there. He had to show up the day he voted and prove who he was.

He has had to prove who he was even since he has been elected. He had to produce an election certificate from his State's chief elections authority before he could come here.

Then when he started here, he had to produce an ID, as every employee has to provide to the new employer, whatever, starting a new job.

And he had to prove to the satisfaction of the Secretary of the Senate that he is, in fact, the same Bernie Moreno who was elected to the U.S. Senate from the State of Ohio.

You have to go through all those steps before you get to wear one of these pins. And without being able to wear one of these pins and be sworn in, you can't vote here.

And the people who vote for you in most States represented by most Senators--including most Democrat Senators--have also had to show who they are.

It is not too late for us to get this done, nor is it too much for us to ask the American people to do that which they have to do every single day--sometimes many times in the same day--to show that they are who they claim to be.

Our right to vote, our most sacred incident of U.S. citizenship, requires nothing less.

Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 5804 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. President, our elections need to be characterized by two things: We need to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. And we need to do that by making sure that people establish their citizenship and, therefore, their eligibility to vote when they register and that they show who they are when they show up on election day.

This isn't hard. This isn't unusual. Every country in the entire world--countries you are familiar with, countries you are not; countries as wide ranging as Mexico, Brazil, India, Argentina, Peru, Botswana, Burundi--

they all have voter ID requirements. We do not.

We do not want to leave this amount of power sitting on the table so that foreign powers can send forth people who are not eligible to vote in this country and vote anyway.

We need to do this. The House of Representatives has passed the SAVE America Act. We now have the opportunity to vote on that same bill, the SAVE America Act, here.

This bill will disenfranchise no one. It will make us all more free. It will protect the sanctity, the dignity of your vote. When we allow people who are not allowed to vote to vote we rob Americans of their vote.

Let's make it easy to vote, hard to cheat. Let's pass this bill.

Mr. President, first of all, the Department of Homeland Security has found tens of thousands of registered noncitizens in the United States.

Motion to Waive

Pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, I move to waive all provisions of the applicable budget resolutions. I move to waive all applicable sections of the act and all applicable budget resolutions for purposes of the pending amendment.

And I ask for the yeas and nays.

Vote on Motion

Mr. President, it is my distinct pleasure to recognize 17 exemplary men and women who are among the best and brightest that Utah has to offer. These individuals have answered the call to service and have received appointments to the U.S. Air Force Academy, the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, the U.S. Military Academy, and the U.S. Naval Academy.

As a member of Congress, it is my privilege under title 10 of the U.S. Code, to nominate a number of young men and women to these iconic service academies. But receiving a congressional nomination does not guarantee acceptance. To be admitted, each applicant must meet--on his or her own merits--the academies' rigorous standards.

I am happy to report that each individual has done this and more. They have demonstrated impressive mental and physical aptitude. Perhaps more importantly, they have shown their high moral character and capacity for leadership, courage, honesty, prudence, and self- discipline. They maintain a steadfast commitment to serve and stand up for our country.

I can say without hesitation that you would be hard pressed to find a more accomplished, talented, patriotic group of American citizens anywhere. They will be a credit to our Nation as they begin their journeys in Colorado Springs, Kings Point, West Point, and Annapolis. I look forward to seeing what they accomplish in their academic years and beyond.

It is my honor to recognize and congratulate these fine Utahns in the U.S. Senate:

Rieder N. Birch will be attending the U.S. Military Academy

at West Point after graduating from Park City High School. He

earned the AP Scholar with Distinction Award for his high

number of AP classes and excellent test scores. He was a

member of the National Honor Society, Fly Fishing Club, Youth

Group Bible Study, and Especially for Athletes where he was

an officer. He played lacrosse for the high school team and a

local club team. He worked on a local mayoral campaign,

coached lacrosse, and was a counselor at Basin Recreation

Camp.

Sebastian William Bodily accepted an appointment to the

U.S. Naval Academy. A 2025 graduate of Park City High School,

Sebastian has successfully spent this year at the Naval

Academy Preparatory School. In high school, Sebastian was

captain of the football and track & field teams, where he

held multiple state and school records. He helped his fellow

students in the Hope Squad and was vice president of the

Investment Club. He has followed his Marine father's advice

in life's challenges to ``adapt and overcome.''

Matthew Jackson Cernyar will join the cadets and his

brother at the Air Force Academy. He prepared for the academy

by taking a large number of AP and concurrent enrollment

classes while maintaining straight A's. At Wasatch High

School he served as president of HOSA, and vice president of

both Turning Point USA and the Let's go to the Moon Club. He

was on the wrestling team, track & field team, and captain of

the cross country team. Jack worked with special needs

students as a peer tutor and through his church's ministry.

Ayaan Garg will be joining his brother at the U.S. Naval

Academy. The Providence Hall High School graduate was a

member of the Navy Junior ROTC where he served in several

leadership positions and earned the NJROTC Student of the

Year Award three times. He played on the tennis team and ran

on the cross country team. Ayaan was the Service Officer for

the National Honor Society, the Health and Ecology Instructor

for a Youthlinc humanitarian trip to India, and the Mayor

Pro-Temp on the Lehi Youth City Council.

Jacob Nicholas Hamblin, a graduate of Corner Canyon High

School, will be attending the Air Force Academy. Jacob stayed

busy in high school with both academics and sports. He took a

number of AP classes while maintaining straight A's. He was

captain of the high school swim and mountain bike teams. Both

sports prepare him to compete in triathlons where he won the

U.S. National Off-Road Championship. Jacob is inspired by his

father's service in the Army Reserves and Utah National Guard

to always be his best.

Mei Li Han will be joining the cadets of the U.S. Military

Academy at West Point after studying this last year at the

University of Utah and interning in my Washington, DC office.

She graduated from Park City High School where she was

captain of the mountain bike team and president of the

National Honor Society. She was a member of the Park City Ski

and Snowboard and Ski Mountaineering teams. She also found

time to take fourteen AP classes, participate in orchestra,

and complete the U.S. Senate Youth Program.

Marshall Stephen Huber will be attending the Air Force

Academy after graduating from Brighton High School. He was a

captain of the track & field team and the football team. He

earned the 5A Offensive Lineman of the Year, First Team All-

State, and Scholar Athlete of the Year awards in football.

Marshall was a member of Especially for Athletes and served

on the Leadership Council. In addition to being a leader on

the field, he leads his peers as they work together to clean

elementary schools, and is an example to his siblings.

Isabel Avery Illian, from Cedar City, chose to accept an

appointment to the Air Force Academy. Her time at SUCCESS

Academy, a charter school tied to Southern Utah University,

where she maintained a 4.0 GPA, prepared her well for an

academy. She earned team and state honors on the track &

field and cross country teams. Izzy plays viola for the

Symphonic orchestra and Orchestra of Southern Utah. She

achieved a Superior Rating in the State Viola Solo and

Ensemble competition. She also volunteered at an elementary

school with kindergarten and first grade students.

Keira Marie Jones worked hard to prepare for the Naval

Academy and is sure to have received good advice from her

brother. The gymnastics standout graduated from Springville

High School with a 4.0 GPA and a challenging academic

courseload. As vice president of the senior class, president

of the National Honor Society, and an officer in the Key

Club, Keira led numerous service projects and completed over

95 hours of service herself that included repainting park

benches, making comfort kits, and working at the local food

bank.

Ellen Renee Kennedy graduated from Waterford School and has

been attending the University of Utah. She has accepted an

appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. An

academy graduate inspired her to find meaning and purpose, so

she is taking her talents to the Army. She served in student

government and volunteered with animal shelters and the Park

West Bees. She was captain of the volleyball team and most

valuable player on both the high school and club teams. She

was the assistant coach of a high school team during college.

Caden Roger Kerrigan will follow his grandfathers into the

Navy, having accepted an appointment to the U.S. Naval

Academy. From Draper, he graduated from Juan Diego Catholic

High School where he took a high number of AP classes, was

awarded the AP Scholar Award, and represented his school at

Boys State. Caden has been recognized as a natural leader--as

captain of the wrestling team, coach for both wrestling and

Jiu-Jitsu, a sports referee, supervisor at multiple jobs, and

older brother to his siblings.

Preston Callister Lang will join the midshipmen at the U.S.

Naval Academy after graduating from Snow Canyon High School.

Preston is a straight-A student who scored a 36 composite on

his ACT has prepared himself both academically and physically

for the academy. He was captain of the wrestling team and

represented Utah three times in the U.S. Marine Corps 16U/

Junior Nationals Freestyle and Greco-Roman National

Championships. He helps others by coaching youth wrestling

and performing acts of service as a member of his church

youth group.

Edward Anthony Jonathan Peek will be attending the U.S.

Merchant Marine Academy after his graduation from Judge

Memorial Catholic High School. AJ was a member of the state

champion basketball team that went All-State three times. He

also played football and lacrosse. He served as captain of

the basketball team and as a counselor at Camp Elim youth

camp. AJ enjoys making music by playing piano and writing and

recording his own pieces.

Gianni Michael Renzetti is on his way to Kings Point, New

York to attend the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy. From

Clinton, Gianni attended Northridge High School. As a member

of the Air Force Junior ROTC, he earned the Air Force

Sergeants Association Award and the American Veterans Award.

He served as Cadet Chief Master Sergeant and Cadet Executive

Officer. He was selected to attend the highly competitive

AFJROTC Flight Academy where he logged over eighty hours of

flight time and earned his private pilot's license.

Jacob Garrett Scott will trade the mountains of the Wasatch

Front in Midway for the Colorado Front at the Air Force

Academy. A graduate of Wasatch High School, Garrett kept a

4.0 GPA with sixteen AP classes and six concurrent enrollment

classes. He was a member of the Air Force Junior ROTC,

president of the Let's go to the Moon Club, the Hive

Newsletter, the Milkmen Quartet, and vice president of

Interact. He was captain of the cross country team and on the

long jump team. He is a co-founder of Sycamore Swing and a

host on the Heber Valley Railroad.

Berkley Jan Smith, after graduating from Mountain View High

School and spending a year at the Georgia Military College as

a Falcon Scholar will enter the U.S. Air Force Academy.

Berkley has been preparing herself by taking a range of AP,

concurrent enrollment, and college classes. She was a leader

in the Mountain View Dance Company, a member of the mountain

bike team, Model UN, and Mock Trial where she earned honors.

She served as vice president of the Georgia Military College

chapter of Turning Point USA.

Conor Lorin Squires, a graduate of Lone Peak High School,

will be attending the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Conor served on the Alpine Youth Council and as a leader in

his church youth group. With these groups and on his own he

found countless ways to volunteer in his community, including

assembling food kits, setting up flags, helping refugees and

those with special needs. He maintained a 4.0 GPA throughout

high school while still participating in several sports and

extracurricular activities.

It has been inspiring to nominate each of these exceptional young men and women. They give me great hope for the future of our armed services and confidence in the destiny of our Nation.

To these 17 appointees, and to all their future classmates from around the country, I commend your achievements and your demonstrated lifelong commitment to service.

While this is but the beginning of your journey, I urge you to remember the foundation of your success thus far. You would not have arrived at this point without the dedication and example of your parents, family, teachers, coaches, and mentors. Moreover, you would not have arrived at this point without your own sacrifice and hard work.

Strive to continue on the path of strong moral character and to keep love of country as a guiding principle. Look to the past with gratitude and to the future with conviction.

If you stay this course, I have no doubt your future holds great things in store.

Mr. President, we need dispatchable power. Something happens when the government subsidizes and otherwise encourages nondispatchable power and punishes and discourages dispatchable power: The price of dispatchable power and power generally goes up.

That is exactly what happened following the passage of the Democrat bill with the Orwellian name of the ``Inflation Reduction Act.'' The same year that was passed, in 2022--that bill, which encouraged and fostered nondispatchable power and discouraged dispatchable power--the cost of electric power went up. It went way up. It went up more than any year since the Energy Information Administration began tracking this data in 1984. That is what happens, and that is what they

want to do more of. We need less of that. We are trying to turn it down. They are trying to accelerate into the turn in a way that would make energy more expensive.

So under the provisions of section 305(b) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, I raise a point of order that the amendment offered is not germane.

Mr. President, we are fortunate. We are blessed to inhabit a country where freedom is the norm, where popular sovereignty is the objective, and has been since the dawn of our Republic. We are celebrating this year the 250th anniversary of this country,

which, itself, was founded upon the idea that all human beings are created equal; that we have certain inalienable rights, among these, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

The consent of the governed--that is the key part. That is what differentiates a tyrannical government--which is to say most governments that have ever existed--versus a government in which men and women are allowed to be free, in which government exists for the specific purpose of serving the people. That is part of what was recognized in the document whose 250th anniversary we will be celebrating on July 4, that governments are indeed instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

So what does that mean to provide your consent? Well, among many other things, it means the ability to participate in selecting who may operate your government, who will wield the levers of government power.

Government power is something that is easily misunderstood. These things don't necessarily occur to us automatically. To remember what government is, sometimes we are inclined to attribute to government qualities that it does not have and can never have, qualities that government can never have specifically because the government is not a person; the government consists of official power, the power to act in the name of an entire country or other body politic, in order to establish rules carrying the force of generally applicable law, enforceable with the immense power of government.

Ultimately, it is, then, about power, and that is one of the many reasons why, even though we need to respect government and respect the authority of government--especially when it is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people--we should never lose sight of the fact that government is best understood as wielding authority that is dangerous.

In other words, like other things that we rely on, that we need, that are necessary in some cases to sustain life, or in other cases to make life manageable or enjoyable, government is one of those many things that, while a key indispensable part of our lives, it is, at its core, dangerous because it is ultimately about force.

And what differentiates government from other entities or other people--endeavors that can bring about force. Government has the ability to use force to enforce law, to enforce compliance with rules that we call laws because they are enforceable by force, with the degree of official sanction and impunity that goes along with being a government.

And that is why--I believe it was George Washington who pointed out that, like fire, government is necessary, but it has to be carefully contained and constrained, less it take over and destroy those very same things that it is there to serve.

James Madison explained it really well in Federalist No. 51, when he explained that if human beings were angels, we wouldn't need government because if we were angels, we would be naturally benevolent, kind, virtuous, and respectful of the law, respectful of order, respectful of each other. And that is not to say that human beings are not that way; I believe that human beings are fundamentally, generally good. But not all human beings are that way, and no human being is that way all of the time.

So getting back to Madison's point, if all human beings were angels, we wouldn't need a government because we wouldn't harm each other; we wouldn't physically injure each other; we wouldn't try to take other people's possessions, things that don't belong to us; we would live in harmony. That is not the condition that we inhabit because, alas, we ourselves are not angels.

So he said: If men and women were angels, they wouldn't need government. He also said: If we had access to angels to run our government, we wouldn't have a problem with government that would require us to subject government to rules.

And that is where this document comes in, the document that was written 11 years after the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration of Independence, remember, in many respects, sort of helped kick off the Revolutionary War. It was sort of already underway a little bit anyway, but it made it really official.

But after the Declaration of Independence was put in place, it took years for us to win that war. By most accounts, 6 or 7 years. I believe it was about 7 years before it was deemed officially won and we defeated the world's last standing superpower at the time.

Now, this was a conflict as if between David and Goliath. Now the original conflict between literally David and Goliath was not a conflict in which the smart money would have been on David. David was a small shepherd boy. David was no match for Goliath. Had the Vegas oddsmakers been in business then, there is no chance that they would have given David good odds at all facing Goliath--this huge individual, armed to the gills, fiercely trained warrior; he was a professional killer. Nobody would have bet on David. Unless they were really, really thrill-seeking, risk-oriented gamblers, they would not have placed bets on David. Now had they done so, I am sure they would have made a fortune because nobody else would have believed that it was possible for David to win, but he did.

So too with the American Revolution. We were David in that battle, and England was Goliath--the world's last-standing military and economic superpower. We chose to take them on. And despite all odds being against us, we won. Took us about 7 years to get through that, but we won, and we reflexively, instinctively put in place a weak system of national government under the Articles of Confederation, which ultimately failed, in large part because in our reflexive instinct to resist that which we had endured under British colonial rule. We had come to fear large, distant national governments--because, in many respects, that is what the American Revolution was about.

It is not as though our American forbearers sat there one day and said: You know, we are tired of flying the Union Jack, or we are tired of having a Monarch. That didn't really explain what happened nor was it about them being tired of singing ``God Save the King'' or tired of the pronunciation they had over there.

Actually, I have no idea whether, or to what extent, the pronunciations differed as much then as they do now, depending on which side of the Atlantic you found yourself on.

It really had to do with this: We were subject to a large, distant, omnipresent, brooding, intrusive, heavily taxing, aggressively regulating national government, one that was so far from the people that it was slow to respond to their needs, even their urgent pleas. It became overly aggressive, and it knew no boundaries around its authority. That is really what the American Revolution was about.

During the seasons, the decades--really, the nearly two centuries--in which we were in this pattern of being British Colonies, we went through cycles. There were seasons when the national government of Great Britain would withdraw and let us sort of govern ourselves. It was during those seasons, in particular, when our local self-rule--our Colonial governments--blossomed, and Americans learned the art of local self-government.

Then there would be other seasons, often during or in the aftermath of a large conflict, a large-scale expensive war. The Crown and Parliament needed to raise funds for a war or to pay off war debts, and very often that is when they would send forth their swarms of regulators and tax collectors to the Colonies, and they would start to hold the Colonies with a tighter grip.

And it was after several cycles of this drama--several cycles of this bipolar, passive aggressive pattern--that we faced from the Crown and Parliament that, in 1776, we decided we had had enough.

So back to the early 1780s, we won the war. We instinctively put together a government that would not resemble the system that we lived under previously. And so we reflexively created this quite weak, anemic national government, and that too proved problematic.

Within just a few years, it became apparent that we couldn't survive unless we had a national government that

was capable of functioning as such; and that our national government couldn't function effectively as a national government unless it had a few powers--including the power to coordinate and regulate commerce between the States and with foreign nations, including the power to raise taxes to, among other things, fund war efforts, fund national defense, assemble armies, and so forth.

And so it was against that backdrop that our Founding Fathers came together in that hot summer of 1787 in Philadelphia. They tried the previous year in 1786. They assembled in Annapolis to deal with the same inadequacies of the Articles of Confederation. They tried to convene, but they failed because they failed to achieve a quorum.

And they assembled in the late spring of 1787. It was still, ostensibly, with the mindset of amending the Articles of Confederation. It was not officially their objective to write an entirely new document and ordain an entirely new structure and framework for our government to operate, and yet that is what they came up with.

I happen to believe that those men were special. They were unusually gifted, unusually well educated, both as compared to their day and ours, in every respect. I believe they were wise men raised up by almighty God to that very purpose, because it is my belief that this is a land that God has preordained for liberty, that he did not intend the sons and daughters of the United States of America to live in captivity under the oppressive yoke of any tyrant, foreign or domestic.

And that is why we are so blessed with those uniquely inspired and inspiring and gifted and well-educated individuals who understood liberty. They understood power. They understood its dark side, and they understood the potential for greatness of any society that can live under the rule of law with this system of laws that attempts to treat people equally.

We may not be equal in our capacity, in our possessions, in our stations in life, but we are all treated equally in terms of the fact that we are all equally subject to a just system of laws. That, from the American Republic's very beginning, has been the objective. While we don't always live up to that to the degree that we should, that is the aspiration; and, in that respect, it is something that differentiates us from so many other nations and certainly did at the time.

What they came up with in the end was a system of government that fairly allocated powers between the States and the Federal sovereign. And it acknowledged that it is just as important for the Federal Government to have power, to be exclusive in its domain over the Federal sovereign, as it is for the States to retain all other powers not granted to the Federal sovereign. It is no less bad for the Federal Government to intrude upon the sovereignty of the States than it is for the States to intrude upon and undermine the sovereignty of the Federal Government.

And that is why the Founding Fathers were inclined to devote so much time, attention, and brain power to this difficult task of assigning to each level of government what its responsibilities would be, and then separately assigning to each branch of the Federal Government--the U.S. Government--which powers could be exercised by and within each branch.

These things were relatively foreign to our English counterparts. They were even relatively new concepts here in some respects. In others, there were patterns that emerged in which you can see a close resemblance between the British system and ours--you know, like a bicameral legislative body, as there was in Parliament; a chief Executive, as there was in England, with a President and a Parliament.

There was some separation of powers, yes, but it wasn't complete. It was nothing like ours was. And then, as now, the dual sovereignty system did not exist in the United Kingdom. It was very rare in the entire world. It was a relatively new creature here.

There were a couple of antecedents. I will mention two of them briefly.

One of them was the Swiss cantons, which had survived for centuries based on an allocation of power. The Swiss Confederacy, as it was known, consisted of a consortium of regional governments called cantons, and they came together for certain national purposes-- including, and especially, national defense.

So, too, was a more local, homegrown, familiar example known as the Iroquois Confederacy. The Iroquois Confederacy had existed and lived for centuries with Tribes that came together, maintained their right, their authority to govern themselves locally at a local level as to internal matters. But they came together and were one when it came to external affairs, especially military matters.

It was in the 1740s that one of our Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin--many decades before we would become an independent Nation and many decades before we would have a Constitution--Benjamin Franklin attended a conference of sorts in Albany, NY. Other attendees at that conference included a chief from the Onondaga Tribe named Canassatego. Canassatego and Benjamin Franklin became friends, or at least allies, as Canassatego explained to Benjamin Franklin the secrets of the Iroquois Confederacy's longevity, its durability, its ability to defend itself--showing him that if you take one arrow and you want to break it, it is easy to break a wooden arrow. But if you take a bundle of five or six of those thin, wooden arrows and you bow them together, you can't just break them like you can easily break an arrow.

Canassatego explained to Benjamin Franklin that this is the secret of the Iroquois Confederacy. If we were just one Tribe--his Tribe, the Onondaga Tribe--if just the Onondaga Tribe had to defend itself, it would be much easier for an enemy Tribe to break. But when we are part of the Iroquois Confederacy--as they had been for centuries--we come together as a confederacy and defend ourselves when we are under common attack, when we need to defend ourselves, and that worked.

In many respects, it was really much more the Iroquois Confederacy than the Swiss cantons that were an inspiration. After all, this was right here on the American continent. Individuals were able to meet and interact with them far more so than they would have ever had the opportunity to interact with government officials from the Swiss Confederacy. And in many respects, the U.S. Government closely resembles at least that spirit, at least that general concept, embraced by the Iroquois Confederacy.

So they wisely came together, and I believe it is fortunate. I believe it was providential and the product of a lot of divine inspiration and intervention that in that hot, sweltering summer of 1778, in Philadelphia, having convened ostensibly for the purpose of amending the Articles of Confederation to cover a couple of major deficits in the Articles of Confederation--they were just going to amend them.

The concept was: We will get together. We will figure out how to deal with the interstate and foreign commerce problem, and with the ability to raise funds, the ability to raise an army and wage war, when necessary, and a few things like that. And then we were going to move on, but they didn't do that. And I think that was another part of the pattern of divine providence intervening on behalf of American people with these wise men raised up by almighty God unto that very purpose to bring about the result that they did.

Finally, in the midsummer of 1787, they signed that document--that document that has now persisted, that has now endured close to two-and- a-half centuries and helped foster the development of the greatest civilization the world has ever known.

Without each of these ingredients, this combination of local self- rule and national government, each remaining in its lane--this concept that we sometimes refer to as federalism--the American experiment would have failed.

So too--and that, by the way, is what I refer to as the vertical, structural protection in the Constitution. We have a lot of protections. The whole thing is a protection. The whole Constitution is a protection in that its purpose for existence is itself restraining government power. In literally every instance, with one possible exception, that is what the Constitution does: It restrains government power.

So it restrains it on these two axes, the one I just described--the allocation of power between the States and the Federal Government is the one we call

federalism. The horizontal protection is the one that I alluded to briefly earlier--the separation of powers. We have got three separate branches of government. I prefer to refer to them coordinate rather than coequal branches. People use different terms to describe them.

I never call them just equal because they really are not equal. They don't wield equal power. They are not equal in terms of their danger.

Many people mistakenly refer to the judicial branch as the most dangerous branch. I think that is a huge mistake. It is just not true. Now, sure, when mistakes happen over there, they do have consequences. They can be bad, especially because it is the least democratic of the three branches. It is the least accountable to the people--by design, because its job is not to curry favor with the people. It is, rather, to decide cases and controversies. And having been appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, the Justices who hold the highest judicial office in this country, on the highest Court of the land, the Supreme Court of the United States--the only Court that is itself established by the Constitution, with the rest of the courts being the creations of Congress, pursuant to our constitutional authority under article III of the Constitution--they are the least accountable to the government because they are there to just decide case and controversies.

The executive branch, run by the President--and, by way, as far as the Constitution is concerned, the President, and to a degree the Vice President, acting together, but primarily the President, is vested with the power of the executive branch.

Insofar as we follow the Constitution correctly, if we were following it to its full capacity, we would continue to recognize today, as the Constitution itself does and has from the beginning, that all executive power is vested in the President of the United States.

Yes, the Vice President is also elected and serves with him. The Vice President serves two principle functions under our Constitution. Function one is to serve as a spare, as a backup, as the person who steps into the role of the President in the event of a death, resignation, impeachment, and removal of the President of the United States.

The second function is to serve as the President of this institution, the U.S. Senate. But beyond that twofold role that I described of the Vice President, the entirety of the executive power is vested in the President of the United States.

This is significant power, to be sure; and yet that power and the power of the Courts is still ancillary to--it is still less than--the power vested in this branch of government, where we work--the executive branch of the U.S. Government, the Congress of the United States.

How do we know it is the most powerful? We know it is the most powerful because we make the law. The other two branches perform ancillary functions to the lawmaking. We make the law. We decide what the law should be, what the penalty for not obeying the law should be. We prescribe these rules of action in the abstract, and it is then up to the executive branch--meaning the President and those who serve under the President--to execute, implement, and enforce the law; in other words, to carry out what it is that we decide. If you want to give it a corporate model analogy, it is as though we are the board of directors and the President is the CEO.

The other way that we know that it is the most powerful and the most dangerous--beyond the fact that we make the laws that the executive implements and enforces and executes and that the judicial branch interprets where people disagree as to its meaning--again, both ancillary functions. Executing and interpreting are both ancillary to lawmaking. The other reason we know that the lawmaking function--and, therefore, the lawmaking organ--the Congress, the legislative branch, is the most dangerous and the most powerful is because they entrusted that power only to the branch of government that they made most accountable to the people at the most regular intervals.

Presidents stand for election only every 4 years. By contrast, every Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, by constitutional design, stands for election every 2 years, every 24 months. In many respects, this feels like a nanosecond in the legislative timeline. It is very frequent. So every Member of the House is up for reelection every 2 years. In the Senate, one-third of our Members are up for reelection every 2 years. That is why we are never very far from an election cycle that will reorder things, that will send in new personnel, send some back home, bring others back in.

This wasn't just because the Founding Fathers decided in the abstract or for optical reasons that this would be fun to try. They did it because they knew that this was the most dangerous power, the most abusable power within the Federal Government and that it shouldn't be entrusted to those who are detached from the people. You need to make them accountable to the people at very regular intervals, and that is precisely what they did.

So when we look at that government today and what it does, it is, in many respects, far more powerful than the Founding Fathers could have imagined, and that is not just because the United States of America has grown from this sort of outpost of ragtag rebels who rebelled against their mother country to being the world's greatest economic and military and educational superpower, not just in existence today but perhaps that human history has ever recorded.

So they would have been surprised by that, but that is not what I am really referring to here. They would have been surprised by the extent to which this government, our national government, our Federal Government, based in this city, has become as powerful as it is within this country, separate and apart from the prominence that this country has acquired through economic growth, military prowess, and so forth. In other words, this government performs a lot more functions than the Founding Fathers ever envisioned, ever ordained, or ever authorized it to perform.

If you read through the Constitution--and you can do it in a few minutes, it is around 5,000 words, it doesn't take that long--most of the powers of the Federal Government are those powers enumerated or listed and given to Congress in one part of the Constitution. There are a few others that you can find throughout the document. Most of them can be found in article I, section 8, with 18 separate clauses. And its powers include primarily the power to establish a uniform system of laws governing immigration and naturalization: who can come into the country, who becomes a citizen, and so forth; the power to collect taxes, to raise money, and to spend that money in pursuit of Federal purposes as ordained by the Constitution--those are both deficits in the Articles of Confederation that they filled--the power to regulate trade, or commerce, between the States with foreign nations and with the Indian Tribes; the power to establish a uniform system of weights and measures and the power to set up a system of postal roads; the power to establish a system of what we now call intellectual property laws: trademarks, copyrights, and patents, basically. They used slightly different language then, but the idea was to protect the right of authors and inventors to protect their art, so to speak, whether that was a design or an invention, a poem, a book--whatever it is. These intellectual property rights would be distinctively national and Federal.

And what, might you ask, do these things have in common? Well, they tend to be the sorts of things that need to be done at the national level. Basically, that seemed to be their standard: Let's figure out what has to be done at the national level lest there be chaos, and let's leave everything else to the States and localities.

There are a few others. Bankruptcy laws come to mind and, of course, the power to provide for our national defense: to assemble an Army and a Navy, the power to declare war. Then there is perhaps my favorite power of Congress that often goes unutilized and inert, almost rendered vestigial but shouldn't be: the power to grant letters of marque and reprisal.

I am referring there, of course, to letters of marque. That is spelled M-A-R-Q-U-E. This is basically a hall pass issued by Congress in the name of the United States that allows the person holding it to engage in state-sponsored acts of piracy on the high seas with

utter impunity, backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. If that is not awesome, I don't know what is. Now, it has been a couple hundred years since we have used those with any regularity. And perhaps it is time we do it again. It is a way of involving privateers in our dirty work, in our military work without the U.S. Government itself having to put American sweat, blood, and treasure on the line.

If individuals want to sign up to do so, they may do so with the hope and expectation that they will reap a liberal, rich reward if they succeed in taking things away from our enemies and being able to bring those things back into our country. It is part of how we have won wars, particularly at a time when we didn't have a whole lot of money. We haven't used those in a long time. Perhaps we ought to look at doing those again.

But my point in reciting all of these--and there are a few others, but this is the lion's share, where the bulk of the power is. There is one other I will mention here that is not found in article I, section 8. There is one that is found in article I, section 4, clause 1 that gives Congress the power to establish rules and regulations not governing elections generally, but governing the election of Federal officials, principally U.S. Senators and U.S. Representatives. They understood and, in fact, openly provided in article I, section 4, clause 1 that those elections would be conducted not by a Federal election official--we don't want that, the Founding Fathers didn't want that then, we don't want that now, and we should never in the future want that--but that the States will conduct those elections and that the States could come up with basic rules to govern the time, place, and manner of those elections. And in the very same clause, they said: But Congress may alter or add to those basic rules and regulations, specifically concerning--exclusively concerning--the election of U.S. Representatives and U.S. Senators.

Why? Well, because that is a Federal power. Congress is the Federal policymaking body. Congress would necessarily have that power. But my point is this: In all of those 18 clauses of article I, section 8, and then in all the other miscellaneous powers of the Federal Government almost always described in the Constitution as powers of Congress-- because, again, it is our job to set the policy. The two other branches perform ancillary--important but ancillary--functions of either executing and implementing the laws we make or interpreting the laws we make.

The Constitution, in giving this power, never once gave the Federal Government power to just legislate generally. They instead gave the U.S. Government the power to do these limited things, to exercise these limited enumerated powers that James Madison described collectively in Federalist No. 45 as few and defined, while by contrast to those powers reserved to the States as numerous and indefinite.

There is no power in there that says you can make good law generally, do good things for good people. That was not what it was about. State legislatures, except as constrained by their State constitutions or as prohibited by the U.S. Constitution, may have some limitations, but except as those limitations are found either in their State constitution or in the U.S. Constitution.

State governments are free in our system to legislate on whatever they want just because it might be good policy, but not all good policy is constitutional within the Federal system because there are a whole lot of things that are not within our power. Among those things are things that tend to happen in one State at one time that aren't crossing across State lines, that don't trigger any of the issues that I mentioned a few minutes ago--national defense, weights and measures, bankruptcy laws, intellectual property laws, and so forth.

Things like labor, manufacturing, agriculture, mining, health, safety, and welfare historically, except as they touch one of the Federal powers, were the province of States and localities. This was always how it was supposed to be.

Now, we have deviated from that substantially, particularly since the 1930s in the New Deal era and particularly since one date that often goes overlooked in American history: April 12, 1937. It is a date when the Constitution was changed but not by constitutional amendment. Had the change in the Constitution that was wrought that day been implemented, been adopted as a constitutional amendment, it would have been one of the most significant constitutional amendments ever adopted, but they didn't do it that way. It was done by the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court, I believe, exceeded its authority and, by so doing, authorized the U.S. Congress to exceed its authority by interpreting one provision--clause 3 of article I, section 8, the commerce clause--to give Congress the open-ended power to regulate not just what it had theretofore been able to regulate as interstate commerce--meaning, up until that time, the commerce clause had always been understood--historically and according to its text, the text, the original understanding--it had always been understood and accepted as authorizing Congress to do a few things: No. 1, we could regulate things or persons moving in interstate commerce; meaning moving across State lines; meaning, if you had interstate commercial transactions. Let's say if you had a farmer in Virginia growing tobacco and he was selling his raw tobacco to a cigar manufacturer in Maryland, that was an interstate commercial transaction. That is part of why the commerce clause was put in there, because neither the laws of Virginia nor the laws of Maryland would be competent to address all the issues that could come up in that commercial transaction occurring across two different States.

You had to have at least some government power that was capable of resolving disputes where one State claimed all of the authority to regulate that transaction and the other State did likewise. Just one of many examples of how and why the commerce clause was designed and originally understood: among other things, to authorize Congress to regulate interstate commercial transactions--things and persons moving in commerce across State lines.

(The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore assumed the Chair.)

It was also understood historically as authorizing Congress to regulate channels and instrumentalities of interstate commerce, the conduits and processes and means by which persons and things typically move interstate in a stream of commerce. And by this we mean interstate roadways, waterways, canals. Today we would add airways, airwaves, and so forth. These are channels and instrumentalities of interstate commerce. There are a lot of these.

To give you an example of one: our telephone system or the internet. These are networks of wires that themselves are all connected, and those wires stretch across States--across every State. If you pick up a telephone here and you make a phone call in Washington, DC--or if you are in Utah--if you pick up a telephone in Provo, UT, my hometown, and you call someone else in Provo, UT--it hasn't crossed interstate lines--that is still subject to Federal regulation because you have touched a channel or an instrumentality of interstate commerce.

By the same token if you board an aircraft in Salt Lake City, UT, and you fly to southern Utah, land in St. George, UT, that is an interstate flight. You have not crossed State lines. And yet that is properly regulated as a Federal thing because you are traveling in interstate airways.

These are channels and instrumentalities of interstate commerce. So what changed on April 12, 1937? Well, it was that the Supreme Court of the United States interpreted the commerce clause giving Congress the power to regulate not only that, not only channels and instrumentalities and interstate commercial transactions but also anything and everything that when measured in the aggregate, even if it takes place in one State at one time, as long as it substantially affected interstate commerce when measured in the aggregate one could regulate it Federally.

Now, does that sound like legalese? Yes, because it is. Does it sound confusing? Yes, it is probably intended to be so. Let me just put this in perspective.

This radically transformed our government the U.S. Government that was originally established and ordained as

a government of powers that James Madison described in Federalist No. 45 as ``few and defined'' while describing the powers reserved for the States as ``numerous and indefinite.''

It almost flipped the equation.

Because of the supremacy clause where we do act, where we have the authority to act, our law governs, our law trumps the inconsistent State law that might conflict with it.

And so, yes, that matters. And that mattered immensely because all of a sudden we went from being a Federal Government with few and defined powers to a government with numerous and indefinite powers because almost everything--almost every aspect of human existence--in one way or another can sort of be characterized as something that when measured in the aggregate substantially affects interstate commerce.

Let me give you an example of this carried to its logical conclusion where it went: NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel was the decision the Supreme Court made on April 12, 1937. It did so in the context of labor regulations.

They said: Yeah, labor, even when we are talking--as we usually are-- about somebody who is working in a job in one State at one time not across interstate lines, not in a channel or instrumentality of interstate commerce, not in the District of Columbia, an Indian Reservation, or some other Federal enclave, but just garden variety labor in a particular State.

Because other people work in other States and people sometimes move from one State to another and money is frequently transacted from one State to another, that means Congress can regulate labor--or that is what they concluded at the time.

Within 5 years, this culminated into a really illustrative flashpoint. In a case called Wickard v. Filburn the Supreme Court of the United States reviewed a case involving the plight of a wheat farmer named Roscoe Filburn. He was a wheat farmer in Ohio, and he got in trouble with the U.S. Government. He was fined many thousands of dollars.

I don't remember what the exact sum was, but as I recall, it was the present-day equivalent of what would have been many tens or perhaps even hundreds of thousands of dollars for a grave offense against the United States.

What, you might ask, was his grave offense? Did he kill somebody? Did he rob a bank? Did he remove too many mattress tags that you are not supposed to remove?

No, they didn't have those then.

No. This was his offense: He grew too much wheat. He grew more wheat than Congress in its infinite wisdom felt was appropriate. Technically speaking, it wasn't Congress' judgment, and this is part of the problem.

Congress, in 1937, perhaps egged on by NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel--Congress passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1937. In the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1937, Congress decided to ordain and establish the U.S. Department of Agriculture as the omniscient, omnipresent arbiter of who may grow what crops and in what quantity, because after all we can't have people growing whatever crops they want in whatever quantities or that would be chaos--dogs and cats living together in the streets, Book of Revelation-style chaos.

We could not have that. We have got to have Congress controlling prices. So we delegated out to the Secretary of Agriculture the power to make his own set of laws, thus violating at once both the vertical protection of federalism because all of the sudden we cannibalized a lot of the State power and made it Federal. We had taken it over from them.

And then we simultaneously disrupted the horizontal protection of separation of powers because we are supposed to make the laws--and we kind of still do--but ever since 1937, we have also kind of just been delegating it out to other people. That is what Congress did with the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1937.

So they said: Secretary of Agriculture, you may--in fact, you must establish production quotas for a whole host of agricultural products.

Why? Well, because we can't have farmers deciding how much wheat or hay or rice or beef to raise. That would be chaos because then we won't be able to control prices. And if Congress can't control prices, it will be chaos. Dogs and cats living together in the streets, Book of Revelation-style apocalyptic nightmares. That was their warning.

So they handed that power over to the Secretary of Agriculture. And what did he do? Well, he sent out to every farmer--we will start at least with every grain farmer in America--these little cards.

I have one of them framed. My son John gave it to me for Christmas a couple years ago. It is a little card just like the one that Roscoe Filburn the wheat farmer would have received, telling him how much wheat--how many bushels of wheat he could grow based on the number of acres he farmed to grow wheat. And they said: You may not exceed X number of bushels.

So we had just exercised the power that was always historically considered a State and local power--if they exercise that power. It would have been a State power because a wheat farmer typically grows wheat--at least in those days they would have and most farmers still today--they were typically operating in one State at one time. They are not growing wheat while on a conveyor belt or a bus that moves interstate or something. So it would have been subject to State and local power.

No. We made it Federal. Once it was Federal, then we messed up the vertical protection of federalism. We then outsourced the lawmaking to the executive branch--not to the President directly, but to the Secretary of Agriculture--and we said: OK. You can now make a bunch of other laws, and those laws will decide how much wheat per acre a wheat farmer may grow and then the same thing for a whole host of other agricultural products.

Back to Roscoe Filburn. He got in trouble. He got fined a ton of money, many thousands of dollars, which is lot more then than it is now.

But, you know, this farmer Roscoe Filburn, he was no simple-minded human. And Roscoe Filburn had what every American should have; he had a darn good lawyer. So when he got to the Supreme Court of the United States he said: You know what? I shouldn't be in trouble at all for this because, yes--yes--it is true. I grew more wheat than Secretary Wickard--the Secretary of Agriculture at the time--told me I could grow. I did it. But I shouldn't get in trouble for that because the wheat--the amount of wheat that I grew in excess of my Federal grain production quota--my limit--never entered interstate commerce.

And that, after all, was the hook, the Federal hook that allowed the U.S. Government authority over Roscoe Filburn's wheat and the wheat grown by every other farmer in America.

So he said that: The amount of wheat that I grew in excess of my quota never entered interstate commerce. Why? Because it never entered commerce at all because it never even left my farm. I took that wheat, the wheat I grew on top of my grain production quota, and I kept it on my farm to use as food for my family and for my animals and to reserve the balance to use as seed in subsequent growing seasons.

That is a darn good argument. It should have been the end of the matter. It wasn't. The Supreme Court wasn't finished with its verbal legal and mental gymnastics.

They said: Ah, but by not complying strictly with your grain production quota and with growing even a small amount of wheat in excess of your grain production limit as granted to you by the Secretary of Agriculture, that means that you bought less wheat than you would have had to buy on the open market; because had you not retained that for use on your own farm, you would have to have bought it somewhere else. And that, in turn, when replicated by other Roscoe Filburns all over the country would itself have in the aggregate a substantial effect on interstate commerce.

It is really quite disgusting if you think about it. We went from a government of few and defined powers to a government of powers that can be described as numerous and indefinite, all without altering or amending the Constitution, which was made deliberately difficult--to amend the Constitution--because it is a law of laws.

It is not supposed to be something you can just change like changing a

pair of socks. You have got to amend the Constitution, and amending the Constitution was made deliberately difficult. There are two mechanisms by which you can do it. We have only ever used one, and that is the mechanism by which two-thirds of both Chambers of Congress propose a constitutional amendment, and that amendment becomes effective only after it has been ratified by three-fourths of the States.

We didn't use that. And had they tried to amend the Constitution like that, it would have never succeeded. It would have failed miserably because they would have known.

It is kind of a problem because ever since then, we have just accepted this premise that the U.S. Government is really powerful, that it can exercise pretty much whatever power it wants because it is only a mental step or two removed from saying: well, this or that affects interstate commerce.

Once we have all this power vested in this government, it became far too easy and far too tempting--far too alluring for Federal lawmakers, U.S. Senators and U.S. Representatives, to cease to be the lawmakers and instead to make other lawmakers to delegate the lawmaking power, to pass laws that read sort of like this: We hereby declare as Congress of the United States that we shall have fair labor standards in the United States and we hereby delegate to the National Labor Relations Board the power to make and interpret and enforce their own rules carrying the force of generally applicable Federal law to make sure that we have fair labor standards.

We hereby declare that we shall have fair trade practices in the United States and hereby give the FTC the power to make its own laws that govern what fair trade practices are, and they can make the law now.

You do this with Agency after Agency after Agency, and so now the people who were once closely connected or at least only one step removed from those who made even their Federal laws, now they are several steps removed from it. And you have got people making their laws who were neither elected by the people nor accountable to them.

Now, lest you think this is a de minimis problem, let me give you this example. I have got two visual aids in my office in addition to the Agricultural Adjustment Act grain production quota just like the one Roscoe Filburn had.

I keep these two stacks of documents. One is a short stack. It is about that tall. It is usually a few thousands pages long, consists of the laws passed by Congress last year. Some would say that is too big, too many pages. Maybe they are right. Regardless, it is about that big.

The other stack is 13 feet tall. In a typical year, it is about 100,000 pages long, stacked--with each of these documents stacked on top of each other. It is 13 feet tall, 100,000 pages long. That consists of the Federal Register.

The Federal Register is the annual cumulative index of Federal regulations as they are first announced, released for notice and comment, creating the illusion of a democratic process--it is just the illusion, the notice and comment process in what is known as modern administrative law in the United States.

It is a fraud. It is a farce, at least as far as any kind of democratic input goes. They do whatever they want. They don't really care that much. I mean, they try to go through the notice and comment period, receive the comments, and make some nominal changes, perhaps if they see something they haven't thought of before.

But for the most part, they are going to do whatever they want because they don't care. They don't work for the American people. They can't be fired by the American people. They don't ever stand for election. Most of them don't even work for anyone who him or herself can be fired.

It is almost government on autopilot, which is a type of government that can't be removed, which is not just something that has the potential for tyranny, it is the literal definition of tyranny.

In fact, some of the leading political philosophers, some of the political philosophers that have the greatest imprint on the thinking of our Founding Fathers, noted that the consolidation of the power to make law with the power to enforce law--if that power is wielded whenever, if ever it is wielded by the same people, it is not just the case that that can lead to tyranny; it is tyranny. It is what tyranny is. So that is a problem.

These are all areas in which we have strayed in one way or another, and it explains how it is that we started from this simple system that was established from the beginning on popular sovereignty and started also from the premise that we wanted local self-rule, local government to be the norm except, where necessary, to wield Federal power, and where Federal power was appropriate, it should be distributed between these three branches of government--one making the laws, one executing and enforcing them, and one interpreting them. We went from that system to a system in which consolidation of power has become the norm rather than distribution of power, which was the entire objective of the Constitution.

Why, then, am I speaking of this today? Over the 2\1/2\ centuries of our country's existence and the soon-to-be 240 years of our operation as a constitutional Republic under the U.S. Constitution of 1787, we have seen these structural protections granted to the American people as part of their freedom, as part of what it means to have popular sovereignty. We have seen them whittled. We have seen them diminished, oftentimes in small increments, other times in giant leaps. But these offenses to the structural Constitution shouldn't be overlooked, they can't be overlooked, and when they are overlooked, it causes other problems. It also makes that much more severe what can happen whenever any other constitutional insult or injury or offense or deviation comes into existence.

Let's take for example--let's suppose that even though most Presidents operating the executive branch of government would pledge while running to faithfully execute the laws of the United States as our Chief Executive Officer--in fact, that is kind of part of the job, part of the oath of office that they take. Insofar as they stray from that and they either exercise power that is not theirs or they refuse to execute power that they are charged with enforcing, that creates its own set of problems.

One of many points in our history that I can point to where that became a problem is during the years January 20, 2021, to January 20, 2025. The President of the United States decided that the borders of the United States and the laws designed to protect the borders of the United States and the laws designed to decide who may enter this country and who may not were sort of optional, and that, after all, it really just needed to be much more about letting people who wanted to be here into our borders and live among us--in many respects, as one of us.

During that 4-year period alone, as stunning as it may seem, 10 to 15 million people entered our country unlawfully with the President of the United States and those serving under him basically--not just basically but genuinely beckoning them on, saying: Come on in. May we get you a cold beverage? Is there anything we can do to make you more comfortable?

Ten to fifteen million--now, this is problematic on so many levels. Congress, over many decades, has enacted laws deciding who may enter and who may not. Congress has, over many decades, decided the terms and conditions by which that may happen, who may enter, and for what period of time, who may work and in what capacity, subject to what restrictions.

These were all just overlooked for the most part as that President-- the one serving from 2021 to 2025--just said: Let's just bring them all in.

He paid lipservice to a couple of laws that appeared to grant fairly broad authority to allow people in for humanitarian purposes, but he didn't follow those. He did not follow the restrictions that those laws put in place; he just said: Come on in.

Realizing that, you know, it was going to be very difficult to stop him from allowing that to happen--and it was. Ten to fifteen million people entered the United States unlawfully during that time period. That by itself is a type of insult, a type of injury to the constitutional structure in that if you have a President who refuses to enforce

the law and, in fact, facilitates the violation of our law, that is itself a type of injury to the Constitution.

It is a type of injury that is often difficult in many respects for the courts to enforce. In some cases, the courts have the chance to do so, and they don't enforce it. But there are a number of constitutional injuries that are very, very difficult for the courts to enforce, and the problem continues.

This by itself was an injury, but the injury compounded. As you might imagine, people were fleeing countries in numbers that large, that many millions of people, all at once. Some of them were running from something. They were all running from something, and some of those people who were running from something had no doubt led a life of criminal activity in their home countries.

Nearly every one of those people, nearly every one of the 10 to 15 million people--maybe more--paid an exorbitant sum. At the low end, we are talking $3,000, $4,000 a head. At the high end, for the higher risk ones--the people who had to travel from farther distances or who had bounties on their heads or warrants out for their arrest on Interpol or whatever--those people were paying many tens of thousands of dollars a head. To whom? Well, not to the U.S. Government--to international drug cartels, which ended up making tens of billions of dollars a year, year after year, during that 4-year reign of terror in which Joe Biden refused to enforce our border.

Meanwhile, if we back up a few years, back up 30 years or so, when Congress passed another law--a law that I am going to reconnect with what happened between 2021 and 2025 in just a moment.

In 1993, Congress enacted a law called the NVRA, the National Voter Registration Act, also known as the motor voter law. It was designed for a purpose--it was meant to make it easier for American citizens to vote. It said this: For any State that agrees to participate in this, they get an amount of Federal funding for cooperating in the Federal program. Nearly every State agreed to participate in it and participates in it to this day.

The program works like this: Under the NVRA, an American citizen in any participating State, which is nearly all of them, can go into a DMV--a department of motor vehicles or whatever you call it in your State--and apply for a driver's license. When they apply for a driver's license, they are free to check a box saying: I would like, while applying for my driver's license, simultaneously to register to vote.

It is kind of a good idea in some ways, I suppose, because when you go to a DMV and you are applying for a driver's license, you typically have to establish who you are. They are going to take your picture. This is going to become an official document. It is sort of like when you register to vote. So why not do both of them at once? It made a lot of sense, I suppose.

But the way it works out is all you have to do is check a box saying: I want to register to vote as I am applying for a driver's license. Then here comes the kicker. All you have to do is sign your name at the bottom saying ``I certify that I am a citizen and otherwise allowed to vote,'' meaning ``I haven't lost my right to vote by virtue of a criminal conviction or something like that or for renouncing my citizenship'' or whatever else could end up doing that. There isn't much else that would have that effect. But that is all it requires. There is no proof. There are no details. Nothing.

Well, back in 1993, even though it wasn't that long ago, the world was a little bit of a different place. We didn't have 30 million-plus noncitizens residing in this country then. We do now. And it wasn't commonplace in those days for the noncitizens who were here to need to have and, in fact, to have a driver's license. So many of them didn't apply for them. Many States didn't offer them if you weren't a citizen.

That has changed, too, since 1993. Nearly every State today will give you a driver's license--no problem--if you are not a citizen. In 19 States plus the District of Columbia, you may freely apply for and receive a driver's license even if you are by your own admission an illegal alien. Even if you are a known illegal alien, you may do so.

So what is to stop them from going in to apply for a driver's license and checking the box saying ``I want to register to vote too''-- especially when all they have to do is sign their name at the bottom? No further questions asked. That is it. It seems risky, right? It seems dangerous.

Well, a couple decades ago, some States started to wrestle with this. Some States started to consider, well, maybe we ought to ask a few questions. Maybe we ought to ask for some type of documentation as to their citizenship.

That issue was raised by the State of Arizona, and in 2013, two decades after the NVRA was passed, the Supreme Court of the United States decided a case called Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona. In that case, the Supreme Court said: We have looked at the NVRA, and we conclude that the NVRA prohibits Arizona or any other State--when registering voters using an NVRA form at a DMV, we conclude that the NVRA prohibits those States from requesting any proof of citizenship or asking further questions with regard to citizenship because this is a Federal matter and any discretion about the requirements of the NVRA have been preempted by Federal law such that the States have no authority to act in that area.

So since 2013, no State is even allowed to inquire into somebody's citizenship when they do this.

It didn't get that much attention at the time. In fact, this is a case that until fairly recently--I introduced this bill in the Senate. My partner on this bill in the House of Representatives is Congressman Chip Roy from Texas. He and I started piecing this puzzle together about 2\1/2\ or 3 years ago. When we put it all together, we realized this really is a problem, and it became an especially acute problem during the Biden Presidency when 10 to 15 million illegal aliens came into this country. We realized the extent to which this could be abused--perhaps is already being abused.

But our greater concern has from the beginning been based on what could occur in the future as people realize the extent to which voting in U.S. elections is really easy if you are not a citizen. That is why we wrote, that is why we introduced what was originally called the SAVE Act, which is a very simple approach. The SAVE Act simply said that when you apply to register to vote using an NVRA form or otherwise register to vote, you have to prove you are a citizen if you want to vote in Federal elections.

Now, the States are free to do whatever they want with regard to their elections. State and local elections are the province of State and local governments. And they themselves may decide, consistent with the terms of their own State constitutions, who may vote in what election.

Until a few years ago, I would have considered it an absurd suggestion if anyone even hinted at the possibility that some States might legalize noncitizen voting. Well, some States have at least for purposes of some local elections.

There are three or four States, plus DC, that at least in some local elections openly allow noncitizen voters. Now that means that they are registering noncitizens to vote in those elections.

As Federal authorities have inquired into how it is they go about separating out those voter registration files and making sure that those noncitizen voters registered to vote in those States are precluded from voting in Federal elections, they go mute. They refuse to answer. They won't say anything.

That is chilling. They are registering noncitizens to vote. We asked them: How do you keep them from voting in Federal elections? And they won't answer. That is not the worst of it.

About half of the States, particularly those with Democrat legislatures and Democrat Governors, refuse to answer any questions about whether, to what extent, in what way they are taking any steps to review their voter registration files to make sure that no noncitizens are not found among them. They refuse to answer. They refuse to share data.

We have established, within the Department of Homeland Security, a database, a database known as the SAVE database, hence the term SAVE Act. I will get in a minute to the name change that happened more recently with the SAVE Act.

It is this database called the SAVE database that was established and designed for this very purpose--to help States to review their voter registration files and take their voter registration data. It is one of the great miracles of modern technology. We have this huge country, some 350 million people who are still living here, most of whom are citizens. But we have got more noncitizens living here than ever before.

But through the miracle of modern technology, it is relatively easy to take these huge files, these huge databases of voter registrations in the 50 States and the District of Columbia, run them through the SAVE database. And it will fairly quickly kick out a report, showing these individuals appear not to be citizens of the United States.

To their credit, a lot of States have taken advantage of this. Interestingly enough, it is basically most, nearly all States with Republican legislatures and Governors have done that or at least have started the process of doing that. In the process, they have discovered many thousands of noncitizens who have, in fact, registered to vote-- many thousands.

That is just in the States that have decided to clean up their files and decided to run them through the SAVE database. Those are the conscientious ones. What about the nonconscientious ones or the ones that are conscientiously, if they might want to call it that, refusing to comply, refusing to even figure out whether they are violating the law?

Remember, it is a Federal offense--it is a Federal felony offense to vote in a U.S. Federal election. It is, likewise, a Federal felony offense to knowingly facilitate and arrange for someone who is not a citizen, knowing that they are not a citizen, to vote in U.S. Federal elections.

And yet these States are just refusing to comply. It is like don't ask, don't tell. Do not tell me where the noncitizens who are voting in our State might be found because we don't want to remove them.

What other legitimate reason could there be to turn a blind eye to this? Knowing all that we know, about 30 million noncitizens living in the United States, 10 to 15 million who just arrived in the last few years alone--how easy it is in almost every State to walk into any DMV and by signing your name and checking a box, registering to vote, including in Federal elections, with four of those States and the District of Columbia openly allowing noncitizens to vote in some local election, and then refusing to tell us what, if anything, they are doing to prevent those noncitizens from voting in Federal elections.

That is why we introduced the SAVE Act. And then in the last couple of months, at the request of President Trump and Majority Leader Thune, we changed the SAVE Act to the SAVE America Act. We had the name change. It is descriptive. It is what we do. We save America by passing this.

And we also added the voter ID provision. This was kind of part of the plan from the beginning. We had originally wanted to introduce it with the voter ID provision of the bill. But we were advised at the time to keep it simple so that we have a simple message about citizenship.

But as time has moved on, we have realized that there is actually great symmetry. And we have come up with this mantra that the SAVE America Act is about making it easy to vote and hard to cheat. It is equally important to accomplish both of those objectives.

Without both of them, you mess things up. If you leave off either of them, you are in trouble. So if you make it easy to vote but also easy to cheat, you are going to have problems. It is going to be chaos.

If you make it hard to vote and hard to cheat, that is going to cause its own set of problems. You don't want to make it hard to vote. You want it to be easy because exercising that constitutionally protected right, that is the fundamental incident, the fundamental blessing. The core element of what it means to be a U.S. citizen should not be difficult to exercise.

And so we wrote a bill that, when passed into law, will make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. If you cheat either one of those, if you give short shrift to either objective, you will have a problem.

Now, how do we do that? Well, we achieve it through two principle means: The SAVE America Act requires voter ID at the time of voting, government-issued photo ID showing that you are who you claim to be and that you are the same person listed under your voter registration file. Very simple.

A whole lot of our States, including, I believe, 22 States represented by at least one, if not two, Democratic Senators, have photo ID laws. So if a whole bunch of Democratic Senators come from States that have voter ID laws, you don't hear them complaining about the voter ID law.

If they don't complain about their own States' voter ID laws, why should they be concerned about ours? Why should their State and local elections be any different than ours when we have the clearest and the strictest penalty against noncitizen voting?

Well, there shouldn't--there isn't a legitimate defense against this. There isn't a legitimate reason to not have a voter ID law in place in the Federal Government, just as so many of the States have.

The second element involves citizenship, citizenship verification. We achieve this citizenship verification in two different ways: One, it is the citizen's responsibility. When a voter shows up to register to vote, he or she must provide some type of proof of citizenship.

Now, ideally, we would like that to be the same type of proof of citizenship that is used in other areas of the Federal Government, most notably, most commonly, the type of proof of U.S. citizenship that every American citizen has for decades and still to this day has to provide when starting a new job, whenever you begin a new job as a new employee.

In fact, everyone in this room, everyone in this building, everyone in the entire Capitol Complex, nearly every--essentially, every employee in the United States of America has had to provide this documentation whenever he or she starts a new job as an employee.

You have to fill out a form called the I-9, where, in addition to stating your name and date of birth and basic information like that, you are also required to provide documentation of your U.S. citizenship. And that is to make sure that those working in the United States, those employed in the United States are either citizens or, if they are not citizens, that they are here on a visa that allows them to work.

Not all visas allow employment; and those visas that allow some employment usually have pretty significant restrictions attached to them, defining the nature and the duration of the work they may carry out here while being paid.

That documentation typically consists of a birth certificate and a government-issued photo ID. Sometimes an original copy of the Social Security card can also suffice to buttress, to supplement the birth certificate. It has got to be an original copy of the birth certificate. Not hard to get. Easier today to get than ever before.

In most States--I believe in every State today, in fact--you can order one of these online if you can't find yours. And for a few dollars, you can order a copy and have it mailed to you within just a few days.

It used to be a little bit harder. You know, in the days before the internet, you would have to write out a letter, put it in the mail, stamp it, wait for it to come back. Maybe they would get it. Maybe they didn't. But it is a lot easier today.

These documents are so common that every American has to provide a set of documents every single time they start a new job. I myself have had to do this a number of times. Since becoming an adult, every single job I have started, I have had to fill out an I-9; and I had to provide that documentation.

I had to do that even here when starting as a U.S. Senator. I had to provide that documentation, and that wasn't the only documentation I had to provide. I also had to provide my election certificate that showed that the people of Utah had, in fact, elected me to the U.S. Senate.

Had I not done so, I couldn't have started this job, just as I couldn't have started any previous job without proving who I was and that I was a U.S. citizen and that I was entitled to be here.

So it requires you to prove your citizenship. The preferred form is the birth certificate, coupled with a government-issued photo ID.

But when we wrote the law, when we wrote this bill, we really wanted to make sure that we didn't make it too hard because, again, we want to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. If you cheat either one of those, if you pay too little attention to either one of those elements, you are going to mess up the equation.

And so we said: Look, there may be some people who have incomplete documentation. Maybe they have got a government-issued photo ID but no birth certificate. Maybe they have the birth certificate but no government-issued photo ID.

Or maybe some people will be missing something else. Maybe they have had a name change. Maybe they have--you know, a woman who has gotten married and decided to take her husband's last name has her birth certificate. The birth certificate doesn't have her husband's last name on it because, you know, obviously, her parents would have had no idea what her husband's name would be or who she would marry. So it wouldn't be on there.

If she can't find her marriage certificate or some other proof of a name change, we don't want that to become a problem. And, in fact, we don't even want it to even become a problem if a voter registering to vote can't find any of his or her documentation. Most of us have those, and we can find them without too much trouble. And if we can't find them, most of us can order one--order a copy and get what we need.

But even if you can't find one of the necessary documents, or you can't find any of them, or because your house burned down, or because your dog ate them or something else--I don't know--we still wanted to make that easy.

And so we provided text in there that is now found in the legislation now pending before the Senate. It starts on page 12, line 22 of this legislation.

And it says that if you can't find any of the other documents, I mean, any of them or all of them, it is OK. You can fill out an affidavit. It is just like filling out a form. You just have to provide a little bit more information.

And then you allow the State to confirm or refute that information that can establish the critical elements of your citizenship.

So, for example, the affidavit would look something like this. If you are a natural-born citizen of the United States, meaning you were a citizen as of the moment of your birth, by virtue of the circumstances surrounding your birth, then you are a natural-born citizen.

And if you are a natural-born citizen, then your affidavit would look something like this: I, John Smith--or whatever your name is--was born on such and such a date in this or that city. Here were my parents' names. Maybe you need that; maybe you don't. And I was a citizen as of the moment of my birth.

It is about all you would need if you had the birthplace, the birth date, and especially your parents' names. It would be very easy for the State to document that. Then, once you fill out that affidavit under penalty of perjury--it is a sworn statement. Once you fill that out, the burden shifts to the State, and unless the State concludes that you have been lying--and if you were to lie about it, there would be consequences because you will have signed it under penalty of perjury-- then you are good. There is no further responsibility, and there is no cost. If you are lying, then, yes, there would be problems, but I don't think most people are going to do that. Most people have sense enough, by the time they have to sign something under penalty of perjury in the form of an affidavit--providing that level of detail--that it is going to be less likely.

In any event, that is a risk that we take on in this legislation. Why? Well, because we want to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. We don't want to skimp on either one of those elements.

You can also prove your citizenship with one document if you have got it. That document is a U.S. passport. Not everybody has one of those. A lot of Americans do. It is useful to have, especially--if you are ever going to engage in any international travel, you are going to need one. If you don't ever travel internationally, you probably don't want to go through the hassle and expense of getting one as they cost a couple of hundred dollars; but if you do have one, you can use it.

So here we are. It is very simple legislation requiring that which we already require in other laws. It is requiring people to do what they do all the time. Every day in America, a whole lot of people are starting a new job. In fact, I would dare say that, of the working-aged adults in the workforce today--I don't know what the average is, but I would imagine that the average American employee probably changes jobs, changes employers, at least every--I don't know--5 or 6 years. Maybe it is more than that. This is not an uncommon thing. And every time you do that, you have got to pony up the documentation for the I-9 to prove you are an American citizen or you can't start the job. So we know people are doing this because we know most adults in this country--at least those who are able to work--do, in fact, have jobs. So this is no mystery.

We also know that--I don't know--I think it is, maybe, 160, 170 million people have passports. To get a passport, you have got to provide--obviously, you can't provide a passport to get a passport unless you have already got one that hasn't yet expired. Then it will serve as proof. If you have never had one or if you have one that has expired, you are going to have to come up with the original documentation: a birth certificate, a government-issued photo ID, a Social Security card, whatever.

But a lot of people go through this--and not just a lot--we are talking hundreds of millions of Americans do this all the time. It is not that difficult. Yet you would never guess this based on the hue and cry we hear from our colleagues across the aisle.

This law has taken on a life and a flavor all its own. This proposed law, this bill, is really, really popular as 90 or 95 percent of all Republican voters support it, and between 70 and 75 percent of Democratic voters support it.

Do you know how hard it is to find any bill or any set of policies that will garner that much support in every racial and age and geographic demographic imaginable? in every party affiliation demographic? It is really uncommon. This thing seems to be growing more popular every single day. In fact, it is controversial only in the halls of this building, the U.S. Capitol. The U.S. Congress is the only place where it is controversial. Only Senate and House Democrats don't like it. The American people overwhelmingly do. Sure, you will find a few people out in the country who don't, but they are vastly outnumbered.

So why would the Democrats here oppose it? Well, let me go through some of the arguments that we hear most frequently against it.

The first argument that we often hear is not necessarily the most common, but it is one that almost always comes up, so I will list it first, which is stunning to me.

The argument goes like this: We can't do this because States are in charge of elections, not the Federal Government. This is a violation of the vertical protection of federalism for the U.S. Government to impose this mandate on the States, which are constitutionally responsible and exclusively responsible for conducting elections.

This is a lie. This is just a baldfaced lie. It is incompatible with any reading of article I, section 4, clause 1. It is, moreover, the height of hypocrisy for people who continue to support a whole litany of laws already enacted by this Congress, pursuant to the very same provision of article I, section 4, clause 1--under the very same provision--yet they don't oppose those.

In fact, the only reason that this law even became necessary--what first got us thinking about it--has to do with this expansive, absurdly incorrect interpretation of the NVRA made by the Supreme Court back in 2013. I say it was absurdly incorrect and it was and it remains that today. It, nonetheless, remains conclusive over the dissent of my former boss Justice Alito, who wrote a masterful dissent explaining why that interpretation was wrong. The majority of the Court persisted with what was an unconscionably bad ruling and not supported by the text.

What irritates me, what astounds me, and what leaves me almost speechless is that not one of our Democratic colleagues--nearly all of whom are raising this trumped up, baseless federalism argument against the SAVE America Act--not one of them has ever breathed a word about the NVRA. Not one of them has ever even hinted at the possibility that we might need to repeal the NVRA. They are not saying that, and I am not arguing that. But taken to its logical conclusion, their own argument leads inexorably to the conclusion that the NVRA itself is unconstitutional, which it is not, but that is where it goes. That is where the hypocrisy starts and does not end.

Shame on them to make a federalism argument here when the plain text of the Constitution says that this is a Federal responsibility and when our existing law that they do not oppose; that they wholeheartedly support; and that some of them were even here and voted for and supported and aggressively advocated to pass--they say nothing about. Yet it is the same law. If this is unconstitutional, that one was way more unconstitutional. Neither one of them is. They know it, and they persist in making these arguments.

Argument No. 2: This argument was made just a little while ago by my friend and colleague the distinguished Senator from Vermont--the last speaker in this Chamber before I started speaking this evening and a good friend of mine. I really do like him, but he is wrong on this. He is not just wrong, but somebody has badly deceived him. He is making the argument that this disenfranchises women. He even read a letter from a constituent, from a woman, in his home State of Vermont who was, understandably, expressing outrage because she believes that she and other women around the State of Vermont and throughout the country are about to be disenfranchised should this bill become law. She will not.

Now, her argument and his argument, in building on her argument raised in her letter and sending alarm bells, should have been something that he as a U.S. Senator would have wanted to correct. After all, we don't want our constituents panicking, especially needlessly, and this one is a needless panic. She wrote to him in a panic, understandably concerned that she and other women across the State of Vermont and throughout the United States of America would be unable to vote because, if after getting married they take their husband's name and their birth certificate doesn't contain their married name--unless you happen to marry somebody with the same last name that you were born with, which very rarely happens--then all of a sudden, you would be unable to vote.

What? This has never been the case. This has never been a problem. It is not a problem when you fill out the I-9 when you start a new job. Yet you use a birth certificate for that. It is not a problem when you apply for a passport. You use a birth certificate for that. It is also not a problem when you register to vote under the SAVE America Act. We make it very simple and clear: If you have got a marriage certificate, that can suffice for establishing the name change. If you have got a name change that occurred for other reasons having to do with adoption or you just wanted to change your name, you can provide the court order approving the name change and recording it. People do change their names, and sometimes there are interesting stories about this.

Years ago, when I was a young missionary in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of the State of Texas, I met a family who told a story of a family friend who decided, one day, that he wanted to change his name to Squirrel. He went to a local courthouse and appeared before the judge.

The judge said: Do you want to change your name?

Yes, sir.

To what do you want to change your name?

And he said: Squirrel.

The judge said: Squirrel? ``Squirrel'' what?

And he said: Squirrel--period--meaning that is it. He just wanted to be ``Squirrel,'' sort of like--I don't know--Cher, Bono, Sting. ``Squirrel--period.''

Well, the court reporter, apparently, recorded that as an answer, so his name is now ``Squirrel Period,'' with the last name spelled P-E-R- I-O-D. That is what it is. So, from now on, unless he has changed his name since then, Squirrel Period has had to establish his identity as Squirrel Period. I hope he has changed his name since then because that doesn't seem like a great last name and rather confusing.

In any event, Squirrel Period, if he were to newly register to vote under this law--and keep in mind, it is only if Squirrel Period decided to move or otherwise had to newly register to vote--this law wouldn't require anything new in terms of his voter registration, meaning, if he is already registered to vote--and there is nothing that requires him to reregister as this law does not--he is not going to have to go in and redo his voter registration. That doesn't change unless or until he moves. Nobody's status quo changes under the citizen provisions of the SAVE America Act unless or until you move.

So, assuming Squirrel Period moved, Squirrel Period would need to, in the first instance, either provide a--if he had a U.S. passport, that would be the easiest way to do it because you can use one document. So he comes forward with his passport. If his passport says ``Squirrel Period,'' then he can register to vote with that. If he doesn't have one of those, then he would get his birth certificate. I have no idea what this individual's name was at the time of his birth. Let's say his name was John Smith. He would provide the birth certificate that says ``John Smith'' and then a copy of the court recording, with the court seal, saying that John Smith had changed his name to Squirrel Period.

But even if Squirrel Period couldn't find any of those documents--not his birth certificate, not the court documentation of his name change from John Smith to Squirrel Period--he could still square out an affidavit establishing those essential elements: I was born John Smith in Harlingen, TX, in 1954. My parents were James and Emma Smith, and I changed my name 25 years later in the general district court of Harlingen, TX, from ``John Smith'' to ``Squirrel Period.'' I am a natural-born citizen.

That would be the end of it.

They hand that over to the State election officials, and it is up to the State election officials to do the rest. Even if he doesn't have a single document to his name at that point, he could still register to vote.

What is wrong with that? There is not a darned thing wrong with that. This is just good government. This is protecting and preserving popular sovereignty--a form of popular sovereignty that we will lose if we continue on this course toward not caring about who votes in our elections.

Yes, we lose a degree of popular sovereignty also when we allow, when we enable, when we facilitate, when we deliberately turn a blind eye to the risk of noncitizens voting in our elections. This is an act of facilitating foreign interference in our own elections. This is a form of democratic suicidality that I don't think we have ever observed in this country.

Why any country would want to attack itself or allow or invite itself to be attacked like this, I do not comprehend. Against such a known risk, it is difficult to understand.

Of course, in addition to these provisions that require the citizen to provide documentation at the time of voter registration, of new voter registration, there are some back-end citizenship verification requirements that don't impose any burden at all on any citizen, that just require the State election officials to routinely go through and review their voter registration files in an effort to weed out those who are not citizens.

Now, they may leave them in there for purposes of voting in State or local elections if their State and local laws and State constitution allow that. That is their business--crazy, in my opinion, but they can do whatever they want on that. But for purposes of ascertaining who may receive a ballot to vote in a Federal election under the provisions of this law, they would be required to work with the people at the Department of Homeland Security who run this SAVE database, cycle their data through that database periodically to identify those who may have registered to vote, and then remove them from eligibility to vote in Federal elections.

Again, that imposes no obligation, no burden on any U.S. citizen other than the government officials involved in that, whose job it is to enforce and apply the law anyway. This doesn't do anything to undermine anyone's right to vote.

So back to the arguments against it. We started with the federalism argument; we refuted that one.

We proceeded then to the argument that this would disenfranchise women--absolutely absurd. There is not a single particle of truth to that.

Argument No. 3, Jim Crow 2.0--that this would somehow disenfranchise racial minorities, Black Americans. Sometimes they articulate it as ``rural Americans,'' which is weird, as if certain demographics within this country, whether racial minorities, rural Americans, or otherwise, can't be expected to have documents. This is just racist. It is not just unsettling; it is not just disturbing; it is not just insensitive; that is racist. Some refer to it as the ``soft bigotry of low expectations.'' There is nothing soft about this bigotry; it is just bigoted. And this is coming from the party of Jim Crow, the party that pioneered and designed Jim Crow, the party that designed this system of laws throughout the Southern United States to systematically, hatefully exclude African Americans from public life and much of private life, to segregate them.

This is evil. I can't imagine why a member of the party of Jim Crow would want to resurrect memories of Jim Crow, especially when making accusations of Jim Crow where accusations of Jim Crow have absolutely no place. There is nothing about this that is that way.

So for them to accuse us of supporting Jim Crow policies--were this not the U.S. Senate, where we have the speech-and-debate clause privilege--I mean, those are not only fighting words, those are defamatory. They are false and defamatory words spoken with knowledge of their falsity and reckless disregard as to their truthfulness. Even under the very, very strict standard of New York Times v. Sullivan, as against a public figure, that is defamatory language. Yet they do it over and over again.

Do you know what else? To show you how absurd this is, if that is Jim Crow, do you know what else is? Well, the Oscars, the Grammys, the Emmys, the Super Bowl, and the Democratic National Convention, because, you know what, to get into the Democratic National Convention, to participate as a delegate in the Democratic National Convention, guess what you have to do. You have to produce photo ID and documentation that you are entitled to be there and that you are eligible to participate and vote in the Democratic National Convention. So if the SAVE America Act is Jim Crow, then so is the Democratic Party.

But, of course, the Democratic Party is not Jim Crow. Yes, they were into that thing many decades ago. Fortunately, that ended many decades ago. But neither is the SAVE America Act.

On that note, let me talk about how that ended many decades ago. How did it end, this awful regime? For centuries before then, when slavery was a thing, African Americans lived in violent oppression and in a truly evil system that deprived them of the dignity of being human beings in every way imageable.

After the Civil War and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were adopted and Reconstruction began, we were supposed to emerge from that. We were making progress toward racial equality in this country until gains made by the Democratic Party in national elections in the 1870s halted Reconstruction, and in many ways, that oppression--the same oppression that kept African Americans in bondage for so long--took on a different form.

Now that slavery was abolished, of course, with the 13th Amendment, the equal protection clause in the 14th Amendment accorded them the rights of full citizenship, no differently than anyone else, and established this principle that the government may not treat you differently based on your race. The 15th Amendment ensured that those formerly in the bondage of slavery would have the right to vote.

Yet, as Reconstruction was halted, a different form of oppression took over and lasted for far too long--for many decades. In fact, kind of the beginning of the end of Jim Crow in many respects started with the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, but there were still vestiges of Jim Crow alive and well after that.

In many respects, what sounded the death knell--not immediately but really started nailing down the end of Jim Crow--was the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That law is instructive here. When that law was still a bill, a proposal, it was passed by the House of Representatives in March of 1964. At the time it was passed by the House, it had a national approval rating of about 51 percent.

It came over here to the Senate. Many people considered it doomed to failure over here because in the Senate, the supporters of the Civil Rights Act didn't have nearly enough votes to achieve cloture in the Senate.

Cloture is, of course, the mechanism codified in rule XXII of the Senate rules that allows the Senate to bring debate to a close.

They were 32 votes shy of the supermajority required for cloture. To his great credit, the Senate majority leader at the time, Senator Mike Mansfield, a Democrat, decided that he was not going to give up even though he was 32 votes short of cloture, which meant effectively that it couldn't pass, or at least that was conventional wisdom.

He said: Nope. We are going to see about that. We are going to debate it, and we are going to require those who oppose this law to come down here day after day, week after week, for as long as it takes to state their opposition to it, and we will require them to hold the floor and to continue to state their opposition and see what happens to the popularity of that bill as they do that.

They did that day after day, and this continued for weeks, a total of 60 days, excluding Sundays, when I think they would discontinue, so for 70 calendar days, but they were in session for 60 days.

Eventually, that started to sharpen the senses of the U.S. Senators who were opposing the legislation. They got tired of standing here day after day to defend the indefensible, to defend an oppressive system of Jim Crow laws, and they got especially tired as they realized that law was getting even more popular even as they were trying to defeat it.

Their position became indefensible, but it took weeks of debating it--literally many, many weeks, like 10 weeks of debate--before they got to the point where they decided they had had enough and they were losing. Their arguments were unpersuasive, and in the end, those arguments became impossible for them to overcome.

So as a result of that fact, having their minds sharpened by physical exhaustion and by the sort of political exhaustion that comes from having to defend an indefensible position, they started negotiating amendments--perhaps initially to save face with the American people and eventually in an effort to try to resolve whatever lingering substantive concerns they had. They were able to do that, and they negotiated amendments, and they adopted amendments. Those amendments eventually were sufficient for them to be able to overcome a 32-vote cloture deficit. The law passed, and with that came the end of the oppressive Jim Crow era.

I believe that the time has come again when we need that kind of filibuster. People who are aware of the filibuster, what it means, start to conflate it, view it as the other side of the same coin as cloture. They are kind of the same thing but not really. They are kind of the other side of the same coin but not really.

You see, cloture is a procedural mechanism--one procedural mechanism that can be used to force debate to a close. You have to have a supermajority of Senators in order to stop all Senators from continuing to speak.

But this isn't necessarily a static thing. The fact that in March of 1964, when there was not a sufficient supermajority to force debate to a close with a cloture vote--in fact, they were 32 votes shy of that-- these guys had the courage to continue debating week after week after week, meaning those who wanted to pass the law, those who were probably being told by some of their colleagues: You are wasting everyone's time. This can't pass. We are 32 votes shy of cloture.

But thank Heavens that we brought Jim Crow to an end. That hateful, oppressive, evil system of laws was

brought to an end because Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield, a Democrat, was willing to make Senators defend their indefensible positions until they could no longer defend them or, alternatively, until they decided it was time to start to agree, to start to negotiate changes and to make changes, to make the bill acceptable, and they finally did that, and they got it passed into law.

Do you know what? Jim Crow is dead, and it is dead in large part because of Mike Mansfield's courage in forcing Members to debate. Thank heavens he didn't give up and throw up his hands and say: Oh, everybody is telling me we can't do this. Thank Heavens he didn't give up and say: Our Members are tired, and they want to go home, or they want to go to Paris or whatever it is that they want to do when the Senate is in recess. Thank Heavens that they were willing to stand with something knowing that it was the right thing to do, knowing that the American people wanted them to do it until it could get done. And it worked, and we are all the beneficiaries of it.

Who knows how long that tyranny would have ended? Who knows how long that hateful regime of Jim Crow would have lasted had Mike Mansfield not had the courage to do that. Yes, I am a Republican, and he was a Democrat, and my hat goes out to him. Thank Heaven above for Mike Mansfield.

I will not pretend for a moment that the similarities between the SAVE America Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 are any greater than they are, but I am also not going to ignore the procedural parallels to them or the procedural dynamics at play in the U.S. Senate that I think warrant our best efforts to try to pass this thing. Unlike March of 1964 when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed by the House, when it had a 51-percent approval rating with the American people, the SAVE America Act is supported by 80 or 85 percent of all Americans today.

And unlike the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which when it arrived in March of 1964 in the Senate Chamber, it faced a daunting, seemingly insurmountable cloture deficit of 32 votes, we have a cloture deficit of only 10 votes. Unlike the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was groundbreaking, revolutionary, brave, yes, but also somewhat complex, it plowed a lot of new ground, a lot for people to digest to understand how it might work--this bill, the SAVE America Act, is relatively simple. It is only 28, 29 pages long.

I think one of the reasons for its popularity is that people totally understand the need to do it, and most people can tell you what it does: It makes it easy to vote and hard to cheat. Well, how does it do that? Voter ID and proof of citizenship, it is that simple.

So, yeah, it is hard. Yeah, we face a cloture deficit, but we have overcome harder obstacles before. We can do hard things. In the U.S. Senate, perhaps we sometimes forget that we can do hard things, but we can. And I assure you, we must. And if I have anything to do with it, we will.

Now, I know that some want to give up, and I know that far too many of my colleagues who want this bill to pass maybe are wondering: How do we do it? I will tell them: Hold on, have faith, have hope, and have the courage to stand up and continue to defend what it is that we know our voters want and what in our hearts we know is right, what we know in our hearts the American people need and deserve. And it is, after all, already against Federal law for noncitizens to vote in U.S. elections, so why not make it official? Why not make it real? Why not make it enforceable?

You see, because this ties to one of the other arguments made regularly against the SAVE America Act, however disingenuously, however shamefully. One of their favorite arguments against the SAVE America Act is we don't need it, we don't need it because noncitizens don't vote. In fact, they don't register to vote because--and here is the kicker--because it is already illegal.

You know how crazy that is? Do you know how absurd that makes you look when you make that argument? That literally is like saying we don't need police to enforce the law because crime is already unlawful. It is like saying we don't need to require liquor store operators to ID their customers to make sure that they don't sell liquor to children because selling liquor to children is already illegal. This makes no sense.

In fact, what they are arguing against the SAVE America Act is arguably even more absurd than those two extremely absurd hypothetical examples I just provided. Why? Because our system of laws, yes, makes it unlawful for noncitizens to vote, but our system of laws, because of the way this has been interpreted and the way it has evolved over the years, it makes it impossible to detect. And when something is impossible to detect, it is impossible to enforce.

Now, it is not impossible to detect in the sense that if you run the voter registration files through the SAVE database, as many States-- primarily those run by Republicans--have done, it is pretty easy to figure out who shouldn't be registered and to remove them from the voter database, to remove their voter registration--or at least their voter registration for purposes relevant to Federal elections.

So it is not that hard if you are a State that doesn't want noncitizens to vote because noncitizens voting in Federal elections is unlawful. So that is really what we are talking about here, isn't it? It is about the States that don't care. It is about the States that know they have got noncitizens registering to vote--and we do because every State that has looked into it has found them. And just from the few States that have started doing it, we know of thousands.

I suspect before long, we will know of thousands just from the small handful of States that have started cleaning out their voter registration files and running their data through the SAVE database. And those are just the States that are conscientious enough to try to make some minimal effort to detect it.

What are we to make then of the States that refuse to answer the most basic questions about who is registered to vote in their State? I would imagine--I am willing to make a guess--that some of those have some of the most rampant problems within their voter registration rolls, some of the most noncitizens.

And so I will not be surprised if, at the end of the day, we discover that tens--perhaps hundreds of thousands of noncitizens are currently registered to vote. That number could sharply spike to many millions or even tens of millions, given the 30 million-plus noncitizens currently residing in this country and the 10 to 15 million noncitizens who entered this country illegally between 2021 and 2025 alone.

And so we will end where we began, talking about our country's birthday, about our 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, of these core concepts of popular sovereignty that this is, in fact, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people; that this is a government in a country in which we acknowledge and have acknowledged for almost exactly 250 years that governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

This government isn't legitimate without our consent, and it ceases to be legitimate when we allow those who are not citizens, who are not part of our body politic, to exercise decisions. If everyone is family, no one is family. If everything is urgent, nothing is urgent. If everyone is given the benefit of citizenship by allowing them to vote, then citizenship means nothing. That is the core message that I wish our Democrat colleagues would accept, and I am confident they will ultimately accept, as we continue to make this argument because we are not going away.

I am not going away. I will be back on this floor in this Chamber day after day, week after week, month after month, as long as it takes. I am not giving up--not a chance in hell am I giving up on this because this is about the American dream itself. This is about the fact that when you allow noncitizens to vote, you are robbing something from the American people, from each individual American citizen, something which is distinctively, rightfully theirs.

You cannot take that away. You are taking it away when you allow somebody else to cast a vote that will cancel out yours. That is unfair, it is unacceptable, it is un-American, it is illegal. We must not tolerate it, and we will not.

At the end of the day, we can ignore this problem all we want. I am not going to ignore it. Eighty-five percent of the American people aren't ignoring it. If there are a few people in this building who want to ignore it, so be it, but it is not going to be easy. And they will eventually have to acknowledge that they are on the wrong side of history, just as those who stood against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 eventually learned that they were on the wrong side of history.

And make no mistake, you are. You are on the wrong side of history. You will ultimately be proven wrong on this. I hope that they come sooner rather than later for your sake, for mine, and for all those we represent.

I fundamentally believe that America's best days remain yet ahead of her. They remain yet ahead of her because the American people, as Winston Churchill is noted to have said--perhaps apocryphally, perhaps accurately so--that the American people will always ``do the right thing'' after they have exhausted every other alternative. If Mr. Churchill didn't mean that as a compliment to the American people, I nonetheless take it as such. It is what we do.

As I noted at the beginning of my remarks, we have certain aspirations that we try to live up to that are embodied in our founding documents, in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution. While we have, countless times, done so imperfectly and at countless times we have fallen far short of that to which we have agreed before God and before government, we know when we need to do better. This is one of those times.

Almighty God intended this land to be a land of liberty--a land of liberty--and I hope and pray it always will be as we honor Him, as we honor our founding documents, and perhaps, most importantly, as we honor each other, as we honor our own citizenship and that of our fellow citizens. In order to do that truly, we must pass the SAVE America Act.

I will be back again and again until this is done. I have miles to go--many, many miles in this journey. I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep. And it is not time to sleep. That time is in the future when this is done. Until then, I will not rest.

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

Mr. President, moments ago, as we convened and before we cast votes getting ready to move forward with the confirmation of our friend and colleague the distinguished junior Senator from Oklahoma to serve as the next Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security--it is important to reflect on the importance of this position and on the importance of the Department that he has been asked by the President of the United States to lead.

This is a Department that, 25 years ago, didn't exist. It was created, of course, in the aftermath of the horrific attacks on the United States homeland on September 11, 2001. It includes within it, among many other pieces, the apparatus that is used to control, as the name of the Department implies, the homeland of the United States; our ability to protect and defend our border, including our ability to protect and defend the border at the border and all the way through the interior of the United States, through the enforcement of our immigration laws.

This, of course, is one of the most fundamental and distinctively Federal powers granted to the U.S. Government by the Constitution. It is uniquely Federal not only in that it is given to the U.S. Government by the Constitution but that it has to be Federal. It would be impossible to do this without it being a Federal power because no one State could be charged with border enforcement.

If you had only the border States doing it, it would be unfair to the border States, and the border States would have to make policy surrounding immigration, border access, and so forth. And that would impact the other States as well. That is why the Founding Fathers were wise to put all of this in the U.S. Government.

So it bears mentioning here that the Department that our friend and colleague the distinguished junior Senator from Oklahoma has been asked to lead, the Department of Homeland Security, is a pretty important one to have funded.

It is indeed regrettable, to put it extremely mildly, that that Department has now been shut down for well over a month. And this doesn't occur in a vacuum. This occurs just a few months after that Department was shut down for a very lengthy period of time, starting in the fall, starting in October.

This isn't fair to the brave men and women who place, in many instances, their own lives, their own comfort, their own safety on the line, day after day after day, to defend the U.S. homeland, to defend our border, to enforce our immigration laws, and to perform so many other tasks that are essential to the security of the American people.

And so when we evaluate that shutdown and its impact, we have to think about some of the other things that it also affects, including, of course, but not limited to, TSA; including FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Authority; including the Coast Guard; and including USCIS, CISA, and the entities within the Department of Homeland Security that operate the SAVE database.

The SAVE database is this entity that is already set up, and it is related

to the name of the legislation we have been considering: the SAVE America Act.

The SAVE database, of course, is what is set up within the Department of Homeland Security to help us ascertain the citizenship or lack thereof of persons who are already registered to vote in the United States.

Ideally, the information should be freely flowing on a very regular basis between the States, and, in particular, the secretaries of state, Lieutenant Governors, or whoever is the chief elections official in each State, to the Department of Homeland Security. They should be running their election data, their voter roll data through the SAVE database on a very regular basis, because by doing that, they can make sure that those who are registering to vote are, in fact, citizens of the United States.

If you wait too long, the task becomes overwhelming or it becomes more difficult. But if it is done on a very regular basis, it can become routine and relatively straightforward.

It is remarkable what can be done with these databases because, you know, we have got hundreds of millions of Americans. We have got--I don't know what the total number of registered voters is. I am guessing somewhere between 150 million and 200 million are registered to vote. That is a lot of names. That is a lot of numbers. That is a lot of voter registration files in 50 different States and the District of Columbia. But having access to this database allows us, in one central location, the benefit of being able to scrub through these voter registration files in every jurisdiction in America to make sure only citizens vote and to do so without its having to take weeks or months or years in order to ascertain. These are some of the many benefits of technology. But this, too, is part of the Department of Homeland Security, and this, too, is therefore affected by the shutdown. In particular, the hard-working men and women who run that Department, including that part of that Department, are now not being paid, not receiving the funding that they need, and that is, in fact, a problem.

Now, ideally, this would take place voluntarily, and the States, uniformly, would share the information because why wouldn't they want to comply with the law? Why wouldn't they want to make sure that they are not facilitating--inadvertently or otherwise--violations of Federal law, including provisions of Federal criminal law that carry with them serious felony penalties? You would think that they would want to be cooperating freely and sharing their data.

Some of the States do this--many of them do--but a whole lot of them, including and especially those with Democrat Governors and/or Democrat legislatures, are adamantly, defiantly refusing to share that data.

What does that tell us?

Now, it is not as though this would involve an enormous amount of effort on the part of those States. It is not as though they can blame it on being short-staffed or on not having the adequate expertise to send over that data because the work is done, largely, almost entirely, by Federal officials on the other end, and every State does have personnel on hand to manage and oversee the maintenance of these voter registration files.

So one must ask the question: Why would these blue States--a couple dozen of them--refuse so consistently, so defiantly to share that information? What is it that they gain from that? What is it that they would lose?

I can't really think of anything legitimate that they would lose by sharing the data. This is a service being offered to them by the U.S. Government. It is not like the U.S. Government is going to charge them a bunch of money to do it. It is not like it is going to require their personnel to do it. So why wouldn't they want that?

Well, before you answer that question in your own mind, let me feed you an additional data point that, I think, has some relevance here.

In a handful of those States--I believe it is three or four States and the District of Columbia at a minimum--they have legalized noncitizen voting within their States in some local elections. Now, why they would want to do this, I do not understand. I fail to comprehend why that is a good idea; it seems like a terrible idea. But no Federal statute prohibits it. Nothing in the U.S. Constitution prohibits it insofar as we are talking about a State or a local election for a State or a local office. In Federal law, neither the Federal statutes nor the U.S. Constitution prohibits that from happening.

So, assuming State law allows it and their State constitutions don't prohibit it, States are allowed to do this. But once they do it, it creates a problem, and it creates a strong inference--a strong presumption--of an ongoing, much bigger problem because, if you are one of those States that allows voters to register to vote and then cast votes in some local elections, that means they have a voter registration file.

Questions have been asked by Federal authorities of the State elections officials in those States: What is it that you are doing? Tell us the process by which you are able to secure a degree of confidence that those voter registration files belonging to noncitizens, who are, by operation of State law, allowed to vote notwithstanding their noncitizen status in local elections--what is it that you are doing to make sure that those same people who have registered to vote don't show up on election day in November or on a primary election day earlier in the year to cast votes in connection with Federal elections? Here I am referring primarily, of course, to U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives elections.

They have been asked that question, and they refuse to answer.

Now, just think about that for a moment. That is pretty chilling.

No matter how many noncitizen voter registration files might be found in those States, one can imagine a scenario in which it could and would make a difference. We can all think of elections, including Federal elections that many of us are familiar with, that have been decided sometimes on the basis of a few thousand votes or a few hundred votes or even a few dozen votes. It does happen, and you never know in advance when it is going to happen.

It is like my late father, also a lawyer, used to say about appellate arguments. It is something that both he and I spent much of our careers as lawyers doing--handling appellate arguments before courts of appeals.

He would sometimes get asked the question: Can the lawyer and the lawyer's argument at oral argument--because before any oral argument happens in the appellate litigation world in the United States, there is an extensive period of briefing. Sharon, my wife, likes to say that a brief--a legal brief--is oxymoronic; it is anything but brief. It certainly isn't brief to write. It is not brief to read, but you have several months of briefing.

Then there is a distinct point in time where the lawyers come together. They show up at the same time, on the same day, and the Court hears oral argument as distinguished from the written argument in the briefing.

And he used to get asked the question: Does oral argument make a difference or is it always decided on the briefs?

He would consistently say the same thing every time he was asked that question: It makes a difference sometimes. You never know when it is going to make a difference, but because we know it makes a difference sometimes, you have to prepare for each argument as if the argument in that case would make all the difference.

So, too, here.

We don't know which races, whether it is a State office, a Federal office, or otherwise--you don't know in which races the margin between fraudulently cast votes and legitimately cast votes might make a difference; so you have to prepare for each election as if it would make all the difference that you had cleaned up your voter registration files.

In this instance, we are not talking about the entire universe of fraudulent votes that could be cast. We are talking about the universe consisting of noncitizens. We know for a fact that this number nationwide is at least in the thousands, and we know that because there are a small handful of States--a growing number of States--that have cleaned up their voter registration files often with the help of the SAVE database at the Department of Homeland Security. On that basis alone, they have discovered thousands--somewhere between thousands

and tens of thousands--of noncitizen voter registration files.

So, when we know that those are out there--and those are just from the States that are run by Governors and legislatures that are willing to share this information with the Department of Homeland Security and are willing to undertake an effort to make sure that only noncitizens are registered to vote in a way that makes them incapable of voting in a Federal election--it really does matter that we get to the bottom of this question because we know that, if there are at least a few thousand to a few tens of thousands from the red States, how many more are there from the blue States?

I can't help but wonder whether there might be a close connection between the blue States being unwilling to share their data and the number of likely noncitizen voter registration files they will have in their databases because, after all, given how little effort it would take on behalf of those States in order to share that information with the SAVE database and the people at the Department of Justice and at the Department of Homeland Security who are looking for them, why else would they be so opposed to it?

So, from that, one can wonder, instead of thousands to tens of thousands, could we be talking about tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands? And if that is how many there might be today, how many more could there be given that we now have something north of 30 million noncitizens residing in the United States, including 10 to 15 million-- maybe more--who came into the country illegally, unlawfully, just in 4 of the last 5 years alone, between 2021 and 2025, during the era of the prolonged Biden border invasion?

In other words, this could get worse. It could get much worse, especially with the number of States that have very late voter registration requirements, including a number of blue States that have same-day voter registration. These numbers could spike very quickly if we don't get to the bottom of this problem and do it very, very soon, which is why I think there is such an interesting connection between the three things that we are talking about right now.

We have been talking for the last few days, and we will continue, I hope, for weeks or for as long as it takes to get it passed, the SAVE America Act, but we are also, simultaneously, talking about that and the confirmation of Markwayne Mullin to be the next DHS Secretary, and legislation to keep the Department of Homeland Security funded, to fund it now that it has been defunded for well over a month. There is a parallel between all three of these things.

In all three instances, our Democratic colleagues are dragging their heels. In all three instances, they are trying to stop something or a series of things that could result in our ability to secure our homeland; to enforce the laws governing our border, governing the immigration and naturalization of this country; and, ultimately, safeguarding our elections.

These are not esoteric points. These are not hypothetical or hyperbolic points. These are about real on-the-ground facts--facts that continue to come out every day, and I expect that. Even in the next few days, as we are debating the SAVE America Act, I will not be surprised if we get even more data points indicating that this is not a hypothetical problem and that this is not a hyperbolic alarm bell that we are sounding. These are real--real--things that have to be dealt with.

So how then do our Democratic colleagues propose that we deal with this?

Well, they are saying that they will stop at nothing to stop the SAVE America Act. When you hear their arguments, their arguments sound overwhelmingly--they sound out on the basis of facts that are not in evidence, not only facts not in evidence but facts contradicted by the legislative text itself. They have erected straw man after straw man from within the contrived, imagined ``parade of horribles'' version of the SAVE America Act that is not actually in the SAVE America Act at all.

Meanwhile, they overlook provisions of the SAVE America Act--most to the point, the text beginning on line 22 of page 12 that makes clear, under the SAVE America Act, the requirements for establishing citizenship at the time of voter registration, No. 1, in addition to the fact that they do not require anyone now registered to redo his or her registration. You don't have to worry about that.

But the point I was getting to, which is second, is that it gives every American who is newly registering to vote under these new voter registration requirements of establishing citizenship--it allows them to establish that by attestation, through a simple affidavit. If you are a natural born citizen, you will provide one set of facts in your sworn statement: I was born in such-and-such a city. These were my parents. Here is the date when I was born--the basic essential facts that one would have to know in order to establish that you are a natural born citizen.

Alternatively, if you were a naturalized citizen--if you were born somewhere else, if you were not a citizen as of the moment of your birth by virtue of the circumstances surrounding your birth, therefore, not a natural born citizen, but at some point you became a naturalized citizen--you would need to provide a different set of facts about where you were born, who your parents were, when you came to this country, under what mechanism, and through what process, and on what date you were made a citizen of the United States.

You can do all of this through a simple affidavit even if you don't have any of the requirements--any of the more typical, more common documents that are required elsewhere--including when every citizen starts any job anywhere in the United States as a U.S. citizen. You have to establish your citizenship. You have to do so with a set of documents that is much more rigid and far less flexible than what we allow for in the SAVE America Act because, to start a job, you have got to fill out the I-9 form. The I-9 form requires you to provide either a U.S. passport to establish citizenship or, alternatively, an original certified copy of your birth certificate, accompanied by a government- issued photo ID or a Social Security card.

Now, for the most part--I don't know how they get around the truly difficult cases there, but it has always been my understanding that, unless or until you can provide those specific documents under the I-9, you are out of luck. You are not starting that job until you can pony up with them. So you are going to have to track them down. You might have to spend a few dollars to get your birth certificate or if you end up going through the additional steps of getting a passport. Many Americans have them; many don't. They cost a couple hundred bucks. So if you are not doing international travel, there is a good chance you don't have one, and you don't necessarily want to shell out $200 to get one. But you pretty much have got to do that when you are starting a new job.

But we wanted the SAVE America Act to be more flexible than that because, after all, we want to make it easy to vote while also making it hard to cheat. So, to that end, we allowed for this alternative method by which you can do a simple affidavit, and you can submit it to the State authority, shifting the burden to them. You are taking the load off of your shoulders and giving it to the State elections officials, who will then have the obligation of confirming or refuting the accuracy of the information you gave them.

Now, if you lied to them and you did that under a sworn statement under penalty of perjury, you could be in a fair amount of trouble, and I don't think most people will do it for that reason alone. But if you are telling the truth, they are also going to figure that out. And given the databases of documents that these State officials will have access to, it should be relatively straightforward for them to be able to confirm or refute citizenship.

So these arguments, these features of the legislation, get ignored over and over and over again. Instead, we hear these parade-of- horribles arguments that you are going to have to shell out 200 bucks to get a passport or you will be unable to vote--false; that if you lost your birth certificate, you won't be able to vote--false; that if you are a married woman who, after getting married, took on your husband's name and you can't find your marriage certificate, you won't be able to vote--false;

that this will somehow disenfranchise, render unable to vote, 21 million currently registered voters in America. That one is completely false, and it gets repeated over and over again. There is not a scintilla of truth to that one.

I understand, at least, where they get to the other ones, but this is just based on some survey done years ago, I believe, by the Brennan Center, identifying that there are about 21 million Americans who are not sure where their documents are that would establish their citizenship. That does not mean they would be disenfranchised. And that, again, completely ignores this provision in the text of the statute, beginning on page 22, line 12, of the SAVE America Act.

So a picture is beginning to emerge. They don't want to fund the entire Department of Homeland Security. We are talking about somewhere between 230,000 and 260,000 hard-working Americans, who are not making a lot of money. They are paid for their services, but they are not getting rich off of this. Many of them, I would imagine, are living paycheck to paycheck. They have got people relying on them. They have got mouths to feed at home--children, spouses--house payments, car payments, and utility bills mounting up.

They don't want to pay them because they are mad at the fact that the border is being enforced. They are mad at the fact that there have been some enforcement efforts in the interior of the country, some of which have resulted in tragedy.

And those are all being investigated right now. Inquiries are going on to figure out what happened. But even before waiting for the final outcome of those investigations, they are willing to shut it all down, to defund ICE and make it impossible for them to do their job.

Meanwhile, they are standing behind the entrenched unwillingness, defiant opposition on the part of these blue States, dozens of them, who are refusing even to share the most basic information--the most basic data--from their voter registration files, such as would allow for the detection and removal of noncitizen voters who are currently able to cast votes, including in Federal elections.

They then move on to making an invented argument, under the Constitution, that this somehow violates the principles of federalism; that it violates the 10th Amendment; that it is Federal overreach. That is absolute nonsense, as article I, section 4, clause 1 gives us, unambiguously, the authority to set needful regulations concerning the conduct of State-run elections for Federal offices.

By the way, that same provision of the Constitution--article I, section 4, clause 1--is that very same provision that was used and relied upon by Congress in 1993 when it passed the NVRA, the National Voter Registration Act, also known as the motor voter law. And it is that same law, the NVRA, that was interpreted, two decades later, by the Supreme Court--wrongly, but conclusively nonetheless--as prohibiting the States from doing any follow up when somebody shows up to a DMV.

The whole point of the NVRA is to allow someone to show up at a department of motor vehicles office in their State, in any participating State--and that is nearly all of them that do participate--and you may, simply by applying for a driver's license, filling out the driver's license application, all you have to do on that driver's license application is check a box saying: Yes, I would like to register to vote. And then, at the very bottom, sign your name saying: Yes, I want to register to vote, and I am entitled to vote. There is no legal impediment to me voting. I am a U.S. citizen and not otherwise barred by law from voting.

And that is it. No specific information is required. No specific information is even allowed. Per this Supreme Court precedent wrongly interpreting the NVRA, you can't even ask them any additional questions to verify that.

Why? Why are they so defiantly, adamantly opposed to funding the Department that protects our homeland, that allows us to enforce border and immigration laws? And they are simultaneously adamantly opposed to legislation that would require people to go through the simple process of establishing who they are and that they are entitled to vote in U.S. elections. Why?

When you marry up the absurdity and the invented form and the hyperbolic nature and, ultimately, the lack of foundation behind the arguments that they raise with what they are doing, this is alarming, to say the least. It is damning.

We are a nation of laws, and we are a nation. You can be neither a nation nor a nation of laws if you don't enforce your border laws, if you don't enforce who may call themselves an American, if you don't enforce who may cast a vote to decide your laws.

We talk a lot about a lot of policy ideas here. We make a lot of laws here. Some would say too many, and they might be right. But this one is different. This is upstream from all of them. They might say it is a metalaw or a protolaw. It is upstream from so many others because we are talking here about the law that determines who will be able to make our laws when voters across this country are casting votes in Federal elections, deciding who will represent them in the U.S. Senate and in the House of Representatives. We want to make sure that those voters are kept in the family, that those votes are kept within the bounds of who is allowed to vote. Only American citizens are allowed to vote in them.

Now, if that upsets the Democrats, they should say so. I haven't heard calls from any of them calling to repeal existing legislation that prohibits noncitizens from voting in Federal elections. It would be interesting if they raised that. That would be an interesting debate. That would be, at least, a more honest discussion, if they were to raise that, but they haven't.

They have instead said: We don't need the SAVE America Act because-- and this one is a kicker--because it is already against the law. That, under these circumstances, is analogous to saying: We don't need a law allowing police to issue citations and monitor traffic at intersections governed by a stop sign because it is already against the law in our State to run a stop sign. And even though police officers, under the status quo, are prohibited from monitoring intersections and taking note of when someone runs a stop sign, we know that people don't run stop signs because it is against the law.

That is directly, closely, tightly analogous to what they are saying here. We don't need a law making our laws prohibiting noncitizen voting because it is already against the law. And we take that defiant, illogical, absurd position, even knowing that it would make it impossible to detect--and therefore prosecute and punish--anyone who breaks that law.

We have got to clear both of these logjams. We have got to get Markwayne Mullin confirmed. I was happy to cast my vote for him and support him through that effort. He is a man with a lot of energy, a lot of ideas, and it is going to take such a man to run the Department of Homeland Security.

We also have to get the Department of Homeland Security funded, and we have to fully enable the Department of Homeland Security to protect the American people--not just by paying them, which is long overdue, but also by giving them the authority to get the data they need from the States in order to make sure that only Americans vote in U.S. elections.

Would the gentleman yield for a question?