Floor Statements

Will the Senator yield for a question?

Will the gentleman yield for a question?

Mr. President, we have had more discussion today on a number of topics. One of the topics that has commanded a lot of today's discussion is the bill that is now pending before the U.S. Senate, the SAVE America Act.

There have been more assertions made on this bill today than there have been in the past. So I need to address each one of those points, particularly those that have not been refuted--or at least adequately refuted today--in connection with these debates. While it is difficult to know exactly where to begin, I am going to begin--before I refute these--just with a generalized statement up front that will facilitate my ability to refute.

These scurrilous and false arguments that have been made against this bill--now, although some of these arguments have been mingled with truth, they are almost entirely false. They are built on lies. They are built on a blatant mischaracterization of the legislative text now pending before the Senate. They are based on a mischaracterization of the legal status quo and the effects of existing laws.

They are based on mischaracterizations of the Constitution. They are based on mischaracterizations of the individual motives of the lawmakers in this body--something that we are not supposed to call into question but that has been called into question on a number of occasions today.

First, as to the general backdrop against which we are operating, we remember that the whole purpose of the SAVE America Act is to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.

We remember the fact that the purpose of the SAVE America Act is to do this through a two-step mechanism--one that focuses on requiring proof of citizenship at the time of voter registration and another that requires photo ID at the time and place of voting.

The whole reason that this law became necessary, that this bill, this legislative project came into existence about 2\1/2\ years ago, was that Congressman Chip Roy and I--Congressman Roy comes from Texas--he and I were talking, and, having been informed by some experts in this area, we pieced together a number of features--legal, factual, historical developments--that have converged into one, producing a massive gap in our election security.

Remember that the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 has been interpreted by the Supreme Court in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona as prohibiting the States from doing any followup to verify, confirm, or refute someone's citizenship.

Although Federal law does, in fact--as has been noted repeatedly today on the floor of the Senate--require that you be a U.S. citizen to vote in a Federal election, that doesn't enforce itself. In fact, that criminal prohibition against noncitizen voting in Federal elections has become more or less impossible to enforce because noncitizen voting is nearly impossible to detect under the status quo.

Because of the Supreme Court's ruling in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona in 2013, the States can't ask for proof of citizenship for anyone who registers to vote at a DMV--through an NVRA form at a DMV while applying for a driver's license and simultaneously going through the process of registering to vote.

Remember, all you have to do with an NVRA form at the DMV while you are applying for a driver's license is check one box saying: Yes, I would like to simultaneously register to vote.

The only further act is to sign your name certifying that you are, in fact, eligible to vote. That is the end of the inquiry, and there can be no more inquiry, and that is part of what is causing so much of a problem.

Decades ago, there were simply fewer noncitizens in the United States.

In many instances, it was difficult to get a driver's license if you were a noncitizen--especially if you were an illegal immigrant--and that, too, has changed. We have now got 30 million-plus noncitizens in this country. We have 10- to 15 million illegal immigrants in this country, specifically illegal immigrants who arrived within that 4-year period between January 20, 2021--the day President Biden took office-- and January 20, 2025--the day President Trump became President for the second time. This veritable flood of illegal immigration--a mass-scale border invasion invited by the Biden administration, contrary to our laws--brought these circumstances about.

So when you merge that with the fact that we have a lot of noncitizens here generally, coupled with the fact that it is impossible for the State to ask for any type of proof of citizenship for someone registering to vote at a DMV through an NVRA-supplied form, you have a recipe for disaster that we have never had previously in this country.

All right. So as to the arguments, they are picking apart arguments with it. Now, these arguments, first of all, are themselves at odds with how the American people approach this. The American people understand that it is not that big of a deal--it is not the end of the world; it is certainly not Armageddon--to suggest that somebody ought to show who they are and that they have the right to do what they want to do, to establish that they are citizens when they register to vote, to establish on the day of voting at the polling location that they are the person indicated on the voter registration file. The American people overwhelmingly understand and accept the fact that this isn't that big of a deal. Sure, it might be an incremental burden for some, but it is not going to be a problem, and it is a problem that Americans are used to dealing with.

You don't go to the bank or to the pharmacy or to the doctor's office or to a hospital, you don't apply for a hunting license or a fishing license, you don't buy a gun, you don't go through TSA and travel--you don't do any of these things and much, much more without being able to prove who you are and that you have the right to do the thing you are about to do.

The same is true with the Oscars, the Grammys, the Emmys, the Super Bowl, and the Democratic National Convention. You cannot get into and participate in the Democratic National Convention unless you show up with voter ID and credentials.

What else is like that? Oh, yes, I know: the U.S. Senate. You cannot come to the U.S. Senate, you can't cast a vote in the U.S. Senate, you certainly can't make it into this Chamber without ID and without credentials establishing that you have the right to be here as a Senator, the right to vote as a Senator, to make laws as a Senator. Every one of us has had to go through this over and over again--not just when we vote or do any of the other things that I mentioned, but when we register as candidates, we have to show who we are and that we are eligible to run for the U.S. Senate, that we meet the constitutional requirements for service in the U.S. Senate. We have to show our ID again when we vote.

Then even after we win our elections--if we are so fortunate as those of us serving in this body have been--you still have to show up and produce an ID on a couple of different occasions. You have to show your ID and your birth certificate or a U.S. passport in order to establish your citizenship, just as you would with any other job.

Remember, every American citizen who has any job as an employee in the United States of America has to establish their citizenship. They have to do that by either showing a U.S. passport that establishes citizenship or, alternatively, a birth certificate and a photo ID.

So we have to do that here, just like any other government employee, any other private sector employee in America. But as Senators, we also have to show up with other documentation. In addition to showing that we are who we claim to be and that we are that person who claims to have been elected to the U.S. Senate in the most recent senatorial election, we also have to show up and have the benefit of an election certificate by our chief elections officer--the secretary of state or Lieutenant Governor in most States--to establish that we are eligible to participate here. So this is no different. And the Democratic National Convention and the Republican National Convention as well. These are not unusual standards or requirements.

So let's get onto these arguments. Over and over and over again, we heard this from both the senior Senator from Rhode Island and from the junior Senator from Rhode Island, among others, over the last few days. We are being told this would bring about a massive campaign of voter disenfranchisement.

Let's remember what ``disenfranchisement'' means. In this context, it means you are taking people who can vote today and making it so that they can't vote tomorrow.

This is an argument conceived in Hell by the Devil himself because it is just utterly false. There is not a scintilla of truth to this. You could try to breathe life into it by adding inference upon inference, taking different statements out of context; you would still be lying if you were making this argument because there is nothing about it that disenfranchises anyone.

(Mrs. BRITT assumed the Chair.)

If anything, what this would do is this would prevent the disenfranchisement of actual U.S. citizens by those who are not citizens of our country, by those who--whether through mistake or, more likely, fraud--may register to vote notwithstanding the fact that they are not eligible to do this.

The modern left has become obsessed with what they consider victimless crimes. We hear about this from the

modern left all the time, and we have heard about that in this very Chamber this very day. They approach noncitizen voting as if it were such a minor thing not only in terms of the numbers, the frequency or infrequency with which it occurs, but also that even if it does happen, let's not worry about it.

Remember, our mantra is, let's make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.

Their mantra appears to be, let's make it easy to vote and screw the rest. We don't care.

When you focus obsessively on ``easy to vote'' to the exclusion of all other things, you are not just increasing marginally the risk of voter fraud--something that they claim doesn't exist and that we have invented into existence because of our own tendencies toward paranoid fantasy--but they are also ignoring the fact that when we allow that to happen, we are disenfranchising actual American citizens, because their vote matters less. Their vote can be canceled out entirely by 1 or more or 1,000 or more or 10,000 or more people who vote in the same jurisdiction who might not be eligible to do so.

So, yes, it matters. And this is not disenfranchisement. It is a little bit like saying you are excluding entire categories of people by requiring them to prove who they are when they start a job--something that we all have to do every time we start a job. And somehow, the American economy continues to function. Somehow, men, women, people of every race and combination of races imaginable in America do that every single day. Most of us do that many times in a single career--we start a new job, we prove who we are. When we go to the DMV, we have to prove who we are. When we get pulled over in our car, we prove who we are. Why is this any different?

They say: Well, it is a constitutionally protected right.

Darn right it is. And it is our job to make sure that is protected. But the fact that it is a constitutionally protected right in no way, shape, or form means that we have to make it easy to vote and screw the rest; let's let them cheat. That is not a rational conclusion--unless, of course, your objective is to facilitate noncitizen, fraudulent voting in our elections, to the disenfranchisement of actual American citizens who are there to vote.

This is not a victimless crime, and shame on my colleagues for suggesting otherwise.

We also heard--this one was from the junior Senator from Rhode Island, and we heard it multiple times not only from him but from the senior Senator from Rhode Island--that it requires a passport to vote under the SAVE America Act.

This is not just a lie; this is a damned lie because the plain black- and-white text of the bill makes it very clear that there are a zillion ways that you can prove your citizenship. Now, there are a couple of them that are easy, that are familiar, that roll off the tongue because we use them elsewhere--like, for example, providing a U.S. passport that establishes citizenship on its own and like showing up with a birth certificate and a government-issued photo ID. That will do it too. Those are the documents we use in the employment context under the I-9 form.

But there is a whole lot of other stuff that we have added to this one. For example, there are certain types of driver's licenses. I don't mean REAL ID because there are a lot of REAL ID driver's licenses that are issued to citizens and noncitizens alike. That has become a point of confusion. There is a subcategory of REAL ID driver's licenses known as the enhanced driver's license issued by some States to some people that contain indicia on the face of the driver's license that will establish citizenship. There are, as I understand it, some Tribal identification papers that will also establish U.S. citizenship--not all of them, but some of them do. There are a handful of other things that will do that.

But in addition to all these mechanisms, you can also show up without a single document in hand. If you don't have them--you can't find them, you lost them, your house burned down, whatever it is--you can show up and you can fill out an affidavit, a sworn affidavit, saying: I, Mike Lee, swear under penalty of perjury that I am a citizen of the United States and this is where I was born.

If you are a natural-born citizen, as I am, as I think most of us here are: I was a citizen as of the moment of my birth by virtue of the circumstances of my birth when I was born on June 4, 1971, in Mesa, AZ, to U.S. citizen parents.

If you are not a--and those are the basic facts. You outline the basic facts of how it is that you became a natural-born citizen--enough facts so that the State election official knows what to look for, knows where to look, and can confirm or refute the existence of your citizenship as a natural-born citizen. You shift the burden onto the State. It doesn't cost you a dime. It doesn't even have to take more than a few minutes to show up and provide that information. Now, some might say: Well, that, too, is a step. Well, yeah, there are a lot of steps in a lot of things, and it is what we do to make sure that the vote matters, to make sure that the vote isn't being just completely left open to fraud and manipulation.

If you take the easy vote nonsense far enough and you don't couple it with anything that makes it hard to cheat, you really are just inviting and--in fact, guaranteeing--fraud. You are guaranteeing effective disenfranchisement, nullification of U.S. citizen voting, and often facilitating foreign election interference--something that my Democratic colleagues claimed for years to be obsessively concerned about, and now, Nah, let's not worry about it. We just want to make it easy to vote.

So it is not true to say that you have got to have a passport to vote. One of the reasons why they like to make this argument, as dishonest as that argument is, is because passports, of course, are something that not everybody has. Some Americans do, but some don't. Some don't travel enough for it to matter, and if and when they needed to travel outside the United States, they will get one. And it is expensive. It costs a couple hundred bucks to get a passport.

And all of us, as Senators, have had a lot of experience helping our constituents get passports. Every one of us has had the experience, not just once or twice but often once or twice a day, where we get a call from a constituent saying: I am supposed to be boarding a plane. I am on my way to London or Yemen or Tokyo or wherever it is, and I can't find my passport or it has expired. And we walk them through the process of doing it.

It does have some expense involved, and there are often delays involved in getting one, but if you have got one, it can be helpful.

But the reason they like to use that argument--falsely claiming over and over and over again for the last 4 days in a row--that you have got to have a passport to register to vote under the SAVE America Act is because they like the fact that there is a cost associated with a passport, and they can use that to make one of the other spurious arguments, which is that this is a poll tax.

Well, of course, we outlawed poll taxes more than 60 years ago by a constitutional amendment, and, of course, this is not a poll tax because you needn't shell out a dime. A poll tax is something that you have to pay for in order to have the right to vote. This is not that-- nothing like that.

All right. Next point. My colleagues continue to argue that every part of this is so fraught with peril, including the very basic elements of what, under this law, the States would need to do to coordinate with and share voter registration data with the relevant Federal Agencies, primarily those within the Department of Homeland Security who operate the already existing SAVE database so that this coordination can occur between State elections officials--those who maintain their voter rolls--and the Federal personnel who maintain this database.

The argument that they are making is that even those parts--even the sharing of data between State officials and Federal officials just to make sure that we don't have noncitizens voting is something that is going to happen, particularly with this many noncitizens in the country, the ease of going into a DMV and applying for a driver's license and simultaneously checking a box and signing your name to register to vote. Given how easy it has become to do that, it is an absolute certainty that

you are going to have a number of people who are noncitizens who are registered to vote.

Now, some of them might be doing it deliberately. I suspect there are quite a few who might do it inadvertently. There may be language barriers involved. They may think they are supposed to check that box, and they will sign their name. They might not know entirely what they are doing or they might not have a complete understanding that whatever their immigration status is, it doesn't allow them to vote.

The point is this: It is a known fact that we have a lot of registered voters in this country who are noncitizens. Let's talk about how we know that.

In the first instance, we have got a small handful of States--but a growing number of States--that have begun a systematic review of their own voter registration files, and they have shared their voter registration file data with the individuals and Agencies within the Department of Homeland Security in Washington, DC, to figure out who is a citizen and who is not.

Those that have done this have found many thousands of noncitizens in their voter files so far. My hat goes off to those who have done it. This is the responsible citizen thing to do, and they have gone through the process of figuring out how to correct the errors.

So some of them have found out that way. Others, as is the case, for example, with the State of Oklahoma--it is a general phenomenon that occurs all over the place, but in Oklahoma they have a law designed specifically for this situation.

Remember, when you are summoned to show up for jury duty, that happens through a random selection of names from voter registration files in the jurisdiction in which potential jurors are drawn, so nobody should be summoned for jury duty unless they are on a list of registered voters. And when registered voters show up for jury duty, with some regularity, they will stand up, and they will say: Hey, I am not a citizen, and I, therefore, cannot serve as a juror.

Now, there all kinds of reasons. I have seen this happen, as a lawyer, many times. People get summoned for jury duty, and some of them will look for excuses not to do it. And some are really good reasons, others less so.

You hear people joke about different ways they could avoid it. I have heard people joke about showing up and saying, you know: I believe in jury nullification; that the jury can do whatever it wants without regard to the law. It doesn't matter. It is all our choice. And some say that is a way to avoid it. I don't encourage that.

Others will say that, well, there was this great episode of the sitcom ``30 Rock'' years ago where I believe Liz Lemon, the main character of the show, showed up for jury duty while dressed as Princess Leia and with just as many indicators that she was really weird as possible, hoping that some of the lawyers would exclude her, perhaps using one of their peremptory challenges to get over it.

Others still might show up and fraudulently claim that they are not citizens when, in fact, they are citizens. So, in Oklahoma, in order to ferret this out, they passed a law that said: All right. If you show up for jury duty having been summoned to show up as a potential juror and you claim that you cannot serve because you are not a citizen, we are going to check. We are going to check to see if you are, in fact, a citizen because if you are not a citizen, you shouldn't have registered to vote, and that is one kind of a problem. We are going to need to remove you from the voter registration files.

If you are, in fact, a registered voter in our State, then you have just stated under penalty of perjury, in order to escape jury duty, that you are not a citizen when, in fact, you are. That is also a problem.

Look, it is much better--don't lie. If you really don't want to do it, show up dressed as Princess Leia or as Chewbacca or something like that. That is probably a better point. I don't recommend that either. Just do your duty as a citizen.

Those States that have adopted procedures like that, whether in the form of a formal law like Oklahoma or as is the case in Michigan, they have adopted a practice: When they assemble those names, they run them through, and inevitably they find a bunch of them were not citizens and then they can remove them.

In other States still, there are four or five States and the District of Columbia in which they openly admit that they register noncitizens to vote because in some local elections within those jurisdictions, they allow noncitizens to vote.

That is a terrible idea. I don't know why they would want to do that, but they do. There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that prohibits it in a State or local election, as long as there is nothing in State law or the applicable State constitution that prohibits it; therefore, they can do so, and some of them have--some of them do. Foolish as it is, they do it anyway.

Curiously, in those States, when U.S. Federal authorities have asked them to explain how it is that they deal with the problem of voter registration files consisting of people who are allowed to participate in certain local elections as noncitizens, how they prevent those same voters who are not citizens, but registered to vote, from casting votes with a normal ballot as for Federal offices like the U.S. House of Representatives or U.S. Senate, every time that question has been asked, they go silent. They won't say a thing, and then they refuse to cooperate.

Now, a few minutes ago, I referred to a number of States that have, on their own, just because they are good citizens--they have taken advantage of the SAVE database within the Department of Homeland Security. They have shared their data, usually having entered into a memorandum of understanding between the State and DHS beforehand.

And then they say: Hey, run the numbers. Show us where we have got people in there that we shouldn't have. To their great credit, they have done that.

But there are a whole bunch of other States that refuse--most so- called blue States. States with Democrat legislatures and/or Democrat Governors have been refusing to do that. And so they have no idea--or at least we have no idea--how many noncitizens might be registered to vote in those States.

So this is kind of a problem.

Anyway, back to the argument made, I believe, by both of the Rhode Island Senators. Boy, the Rhode Island Senators sure had a lot to say today. They just didn't have a lot of good things to say about the SAVE America Act--and by ``good things,'' I don't mean that they were criticizing it. I mean they were using really bad arguments that are not rooted in truth and that are made with either knowledge of their falsity or reckless disregard as to their truthfulness.

So this is where it gets interesting. They argue that we can't even trust the States--the States can't even trust the Department of Homeland Security or anyone in the Trump administration with that data that under the SAVE America Act they would be required to supply to the Department of Homeland Security for this review.

And we can't, why? Well, the argument--they use a lot more words to say it, but it basically boils down to three words: ``Orange man bad.''

Now, that is not a good reason. That is a lame-ass argument to get to a very simple point. They are saying: We don't trust the U.S. Government with data because some of it contains personally identifying information.

Well, welcome to the U.S. Government. They know everything about us. There is no fact that they do not have on us, on every American citizen, like it or not.

We do everything we can--and we do everything we can in this legislation--to make sure that privacy is respected. But with or without that information being handed over by a State election official to the Department of Homeland Security for the sole purpose of ascertaining voter eligibility, it does nothing to maximize or to further protect the privacy of the American people, nor are my Democratic colleagues saying or even suggesting in any way, shape, or form that they want to undo all the thousands, if not millions, of other instances, areas in which they collect a whole lot of data, including a whole lot of personally identifying data on U.S. citizens.

So they are just hyperfocusing on this one where, by the way, the ease and simplicity of protecting the privacy and the personal information of

individual U.S. citizens is far easier than it is in the context of the IRS or of the financial transactions or everything else that the U.S. Government keeps track of. So this strikes me as pretextual; and, of course, pretextual is a fancy word for it is a cheap excuse for the real reason.

Now, maybe we will get to a real reason in a minute. Let's just say that they are opposing this for a reason, but none of the reasons that they are offering pass muster--not one of them can withstand scrutiny.

So their argument that ``Trump bad'' equals no State should have to share its data, even where necessary in order to weed out fraud in Federal elections--that argument isn't good. That argument is basically saying that we don't want our States to have to do that because we are pretty sure that our States have registered a whole bunch of noncitizen voters, and we don't want to have to give them up.

(Mrs. MOODY assumed the Chair.)

From day one, when they talked about this, even before debate began in the Senate, my Democratic colleagues have been arguing that anyone whose name would likely trigger alarm bells through the processes established by the SAVE America Act warranting their removal based on their status as noncitizens--they said that anyone who would likely be removed from the voter registration files would be more likely to be a Democrat than a Republican and that would be bad for us. They literally said this.

Now, they are careful not to say ``because they are noncitizens,'' but that is the reason. That is the only reason you would be removed through this framework is if they are noncitizens.

And so when they say over and over again this is going to disenfranchise people, it is going to take away their vote--well, yeah, if you are a noncitizen. But if you are not, it is not going to.

And so this process that they go through in defending the status quo and in saying that Armageddon will be upon us if we require people to show up with a photo ID when they vote, to show that they are citizens when they register to vote, and that the States are going to share their data on their voter registration files with the Department of Homeland Security just to make sure that they are, in fact, not voting in U.S. elections as noncitizens--when they object that strongly to it, it makes you wonder why they are so upset. And I think the question answers itself. It speaks for itself when they freak out over something like this.

They have no problem with any of the other myriad areas in which voter ID is required--or photo ID is required. In fact, in the last Congress, when President Biden was still in office and when the Democrats had the majority in this Chamber--we are talking just a little over a year ago--every Democrat in the Senate then joined in and supported legislation that contained a voter ID element. So the voter ID component of it, most of them have said they are OK with it.

Then when we tried to offer that one up and pass it by unanimous consent at the motion of our friend and distinguished colleague, the junior Senator from Ohio, who has got probably more knowledge of how elections work and State election systems operate than any other Member of the House or Senate--past, present, or future--this guy is sort of the--he is the Einstein of election systems. So he offered that up, accepting at face value our Democratic colleagues' repeated insistence that they don't have a problem with voter ID requirements, and it still drew an objection. Now, it drew an objection that made no sense because the objection articulated had nothing to do with voter ID. At least that is how I heard it. So that was kind of an issue. All right.

Next argument: This one came specifically from the junior Senator from Rhode Island who, if I have this right, falsely claimed that the Supreme Court of the United States has said that it is unconstitutional to ask a registering voter for proof of citizenship. Now, if I misunderstood that, I hope and expect to be corrected, but I don't think I did. I think that was the argument. And if that was the argument, that argument is a lie. It is absolutely false. It is not only guilty of being false; it is innocent of being true.

The Supreme Court ruling to which he is referring is this case called Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona. It was wrongly decided, but it is conclusive nonetheless. The majority opinion reached this conclusion. It did not say it is unconstitutional to ask a registering voter for proof of citizenship--far from it. It said that based on the text of the 1993 NVRA, as passed by Congress, that the text, as a matter of statutory interpretation, preempts, prohibits any State using the NVRA form at a DMV from asking any driver's license applicant simultaneously registering to vote to also establish citizenship.

That is a statutory conclusion--one that we are free to change. It is not a constitutional mandate. It is far from a constitutional mandate. Now, if that is what my friend and colleague the distinguished junior Senator from Rhode Island meant to say, then he is just plain wrong. But by saying that, he is suggesting that we are powerless, absent a constitutional amendment, from requiring any registering voter to provide proof of citizenship, which would make no sense, by the way, I mean, given how many times you are required elsewhere in Federal law-- to say nothing of State law but even just in Federal law--to establish who you are and that you are a U.S. citizen.

Now, for example, you have to do that on the I-9 every time you start a new job. Every American has to do that or you can't start the job. You also have to do it when you apply for a passport. And there are related issues of proof that you have to do in many, many other circumstances. If you want to buy a firearm and you go into a federally licensed firearms dealer, you have to provide a photo ID. You then have to go through a background check. You have to show who you are.

To this the Democrats say: Oh, but this is a constitutionally protected right. You have a constitutionally protected right to vote. True. There are multiple provisions of the U.S. Constitution that in different ways protect your right to vote. Yes, it is constitutionally protected. So too are a whole lot of other things. So too is your right to travel, and yet your right to travel is not unqualified. If you want to travel in and out of the United States, then you are going to have to get a passport. If you want to travel between two States or even two cities through commercial air travel, you are, at a minimum, going to have to show a driver's license. Yet your right to travel is constitutionally protected; the right to bear arms is constitutionally protected, as is the right to vote.

So the fact that something is constitutionally protected doesn't mean that there are and can be no guardrails around that to make sure that you are a person who is allowed to exercise the constitutionally protected right in question. That never has been the case, and it never will be the case. You still don't escape the need to establish who you are and that you have that right.

Next comes the argument made repeatedly by both the junior Senator from Rhode Island and the senior Senator from Rhode Island that this will somehow disenfranchise women. This has to be one of the dumbest arguments that I have ever heard, not just in connection with this bill, the SAVE America Act, but with any bill ever debated in the 15\1/ 2\ years I have been in the U.S. Senate. I find it utterly offensive to suggest that women just can't possibly be expected to get their stuff together enough to establish who they are and that they are citizens; or, as the argument goes, women who get married and change their name upon getting married are never ever going to be able to prove who they are after they change their name because, after all, their parents couldn't have known what their married name would be when they were born, so we just can't pass this law.

This is really, really dumb. I mean, first of all, we have a lot of women serving in the U.S. Senate, every one of whom had to prove their citizenship, had to establish their election certificate, and many of whom have been married and changed their name in connection with that. And it is not just the women of the U.S. Senate; it is all women anywhere. And I know a lot of women. I have five sisters. My wife also has five sisters. Between us, that is 10 sisters. That is a lot of sisters. Every

damn one of them knows how to establish who they are and that they are entitled to vote. This is not a problem. And they are all married, and they all have married names that were different than the name listed on their birth certificate. It is not a problem. It is not just my family that is like that. I would imagine that the Presiding Officer's family is the same way. Women are no less capable than men of establishing who they are and supplying the necessary documentation.

Now, of course, what they say is: But what if they did--what if they did get married and what if they could find all the other pieces of documentation--maybe their maiden name is still on their passport, if they have one. And their maiden name would obviously be used on their birth certificate. Well, that is not a problem either, for the same reason that it is not a problem if you don't have any documentation.

It is best if you have the normal documentation because it is going to save the State governments a whole lot of trouble under this bill. It makes it a lot easier for them if you just show up with the right documentation, which most people have. But if you don't, that is OK. We have made that OK too. You just have to do an attestation, a short paragraph outlining who you are, when and where you were born, how you became a citizen, whether you were a citizen as of the moment of your birth by virtue of the circumstances surrounding your birth, or whether you were naturalized, and, if so, when, where, and how.

It is not hard. You could write that out. Any American could write out that information in probably less than 2 minutes. I know I could. Whether or not it would be fully legible is a different question. I might need 3 minutes to make sure that my handwriting is neat enough to be read, and even then it is a jump ball. It is an open question, but I am pretty sure I would be OK.

Every single time we bring this up, they refuse to acknowledge the language in the statute, in the bill. Page 12, line 22 and the text that follows from it makes very clear that if you are missing any of that documentation--let's say you are a married woman whose birth certificate and whose passport and whose other documentation uses only your maiden name and not your married name and you can't find your marriage certificate. By the way, if you can find it, that is conclusive proof of the name change. You don't have to worry about it at all.

But let's say you can't find the marriage certificate and you have everything else. Then you swear out a brief affidavit: I got married on July such and such of such and such a year. And I married so-and-so. His name is Jones. My maiden name was Smith, so I changed it from Smith to Jones.

You are done. That is it. From that moment forward, whether you are missing one document or all documents, you fill out the affidavit, you hand it over to the State election official. They will ask any follow- up questions they need, and from that moment forward, the burden is off your shoulders; the burden is shifted to the State authorities, whose job it is to confirm or refute your citizenship or lack thereof.

States, remember, have access to all kinds of information: birth certificates issued in that State. I believe many, if not most, if not all States, have reciprocal arrangements with other States where they can confirm or refute information on each other's databases about birth and death records and so forth. This is not hard. Yet they refuse to acknowledge that language. They just go on over and over again saying: You are going to disenfranchise women.

Look, the American people don't buy it, and the American people know that when you raise bull-crap arguments over and over and over again, you are not taking the American people seriously, especially when you insult their intelligence and competence by saying that vast swaths of people--and I have heard everything under the book. You name it. I have heard it stated with regard to rural Americans as opposed to more urban Americans--or suburban Americans, people of certain ethnic or racial backgrounds, men, women, old people, young people. They try to otherize just about everybody imaginable and say that certain subgroups will somehow be disenfranchised, disadvantaged. This is all nonsense, and it all ignores the same central feature in the bill that makes this tremendously easy.

All right. The next argument that they both make: fees. You have to pay fees somehow to vote. This gets back to their poll tax argument. Utter lie built on paranoid fantasy, conceived in hell by the devil himself, to make these arguments over and over again to scare people. This really has to stop at some point or another.

At times, they start to argue against the photo ID point minimally, and then they remember that many, if not most of them, at one point or another--including some in the last few days--have said they are OK with photo ID. And so they don't argue with that one too much. But at the same time, they don't own up to the fact that every Democrat in here in the last Congress was, I believe, a cosponsor of legislation that contained an ID requirement. Now, it was a little bit different than this one. The biggest difference was that it wasn't quite as tight, but there was a type of ID requirement in that bill. It is not that different.

Now, they kept arguing also that this would disproportionately burden citizen voters, that it would be citizens that really would have to worry and that this would end up resulting in the disenfranchisement of lots and lots of citizens.

The senior Senator from Rhode Island even went so far as to say a couple of things. I had to listen carefully when he started to say this because I thought he was joking at first or I hoped I was misunderstanding him.

He started to theorize back to this point that ``the orange man bad,'' so none of this can happen. We hate Trump. We can't trust Trump or anybody in his administration. Therefore, we are going to just say that all of it is unacceptable.

He was saying that if this law passes, we can expect that the Trump administration might just willy-nilly cancel the voter registration files of anyone they felt like canceling. If somebody looked like they might not be a Trump voter or something bothered them about this or that person, they might just willy-nilly say: When in doubt, throw them out.

The senior Senator from Rhode Island even went a step further, in a way that pained me to hear because it is so absurd. He said it is even something we should have to worry about, that the Trump administration could go in and just cancel all the voter registration files in an entire State.

This is nonsense.

Not only is that absurd--to think that they would do that, to think they could get away with it--it is utterly at odds with the text of the legislation. Nothing in the legislation would allow them to do that under any circumstance, other than where, having received the data from the States, they run it through their database, and they identify people: These appear to be noncitizens.

They, then, notify the States: These appear to be noncitizens, voters 1 through 5,000--whatever, however many there are.

Even at that point, they are not removed. The State then does its job of going back through, and if the State believes that the Federal authorities got it wrong, they can push back on that.

The U.S. Government under this regime wouldn't have the authority to just go in and say: He is gone. She is gone. Get rid of this file. Get rid of that file.

They can flag things for the States, and it would be up to the States, ultimately, to remove them. But it is a collaborative, iterative process. It is not one in which they could go in and just say, ``This guy bothers me; get rid of him,'' or cancel all the voter registrations in an entire State.

I mean, let's be realistic. That is not realistic, and it is absurd to argue because it is utterly false that this bill, if it were signed into law, would have that effect. It is just a lie.

OK. Next, the senior Senator from Rhode Island had a real doozy with this one. He said: You know--after doubting whether any of this occurs--let's not bicker and argue about who might be registered to vote as a noncitizen. It probably doesn't happen ever. If it does, it is only a little.

Well, that is cold comfort to anyone in a jurisdiction that has ever experienced what happens when there is a

close election and somebody wins by just a handful of votes. It is cold comfort to say: Well, there are only a few noncitizens fraudulently voting.

But separate and apart from that, he was saying: The best way that we can handle this is just enforce existing law.

Do you know how absurd that is? Do you know how sophomoric, shallow, simple-minded that is--not to mention how reckless and utterly dishonest that is?

Let's work that through for a minute. What does that mean, ``enforce existing law''? This is like the candidates who run for existing office that say: Well, I know how I will balance the Federal budget. Just eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse.

Oh, gosh, we didn't think about that before.

The difficulty lies in identifying it. You have to be able to identify the waste, fraud, and abuse, which we should do a better job of doing that we do. It is one of the reasons why we have systems like DOGE and why we have things like rescissions packages. I wish we did them more often and more aggressively, but it is why we have them.

It is not as easy as just saying: Let's just do it.

It reminds me of a movie. There has been a remake of it that I don't think was as good. The original movie was called ``Meatballs''--you know, the one that came out in the 1970s, I think. It stars Bill Murray.

Bill Murray is this camp counselor, and in the camp Olympics, they were going up against Camp North Star. Camp North Star had a lot of almost professionally trained athletes. Bill Murray, the camp counselor character, just kept reminding people that they had their own coaches, their other personal masseuse on board. And they were really worried about going into the camp Olympics against the rival camp, a bunch of rich kids at Camp North Star--I think is what it was called.

The one young man was about to compete in the high jump, and he went up to Bill Murray and he said: Do you have advice for me just before I make this jump?

Bill Murray looked at him and he said: Yes.

He got this very introspective look on his face, and he said: Try to jump very, very high.

That is kind of what happens when you hear someone say, ``Oh, it is easy--waste, fraud, and abuse''; or ``It is easy; let's just enforce existing law.''

So this was his argument. It was that we can just enforce existing law because existing law, including but not limited to laws codified in 18 U.S.C. 1015, prohibit noncitizens from voting in U.S. elections. So let's just enforce it.

That is the whole darn point. That is the whole reason why Chip Roy and I wrote the SAVE America Act in the first place. It is the whole reason we had to, because our existing laws, as interpreted and as implemented, make it impossible--impossible--to find out where this is happening.

We can't enforce existing law, at least not existing law within States that, No. 1, refuse voluntarily to come forward and share their voter registration file data with DHS to run it through the SAVE database, which I think roughly half of the States, blue States in particular, are refusing to do.

And those States include especially the small handful of States that openly, brazenly admit that they allow noncitizens to register to vote to participate in certain local elections, even though they are noncitizens.

So with all those States, including the handful of States that allow--expressly allow--noncitizens to vote and then offer no explanation as to how they keep them separate from those who are able to participate in elections for Federal office, they expect us to just, oh, enforce the law.

Now, Rhode Island is a blue State. I will check to make sure, but I will bet $5--a lot of money where I come from--that Rhode Island is one of those States that defiantly refuses to share their voter registration data.

So how in the heck are we supposed to enforce the law when they make it impossible to enforce the law? It is unknown, and it is unknowable. This is like--I guess it is like the ancient Egyptians telling the children of Israel that they had to make bricks without straw.

It can't be done, but they are just fine with that, just as the ancient Egyptians weren't all that concerned about the working conditions, the health, or the pragmatics behind their slaves.

Apparently, our Democrat colleagues are not all that concerned about noncitizens voting.

All right, one more movie quote while we are on the topic: ``Shrek'' is one of the great cinematic masterpieces of the last 40, 50 years; half-century--``Shrek.''

There is a character named Lord Farquaad. Lord Farquaad is not what you would call a nice guy. Lord Farquaad is a despot. He is a tyrant. He is a fascist, and he is talking to his soldiers as he is about to send them into battle.

He says: Now, I realize that in this battle some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make.

It seems like some of our Democrat Senators are approaching this with an analogous attitude. I realize if we do nothing, if we do not pass the SAVE America Act, we could have thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of noncitizens currently registered to vote in this country who will end up voting in Federal elections, and in some instances might even decide the outcome of elections. But that is a sacrifice we are willing to make.

Why? It benefits them. That old Latin phrase, cui bono--who benefits? They do. They benefit from the status quo in which it is impossible to enforce existing law.

So, no, Mr. Senator from Rhode Island, don't talk to me about the fact that we don't need this because all we have to do is enforce the law.

It can't be done. You know that, and you are all too content with that. So knock it off.

The senior Senator from Rhode Island goes on to say that they will just use it to purge voter rolls.

Well, yes, that is the idea, to purge voter rolls of illegal voters, of noncitizens, not U.S. citizens.

Nothing in the law would authorize that. If somebody tried to do it, not only would they lose in court, but they would be fired from their job, and they might even be imprisoned.

I mean, this is serious business, and they are treating it as if they could just make up the facts and make up the law.

They are entitled to their opinions. They are not entitled to their own facts. Those things they want us to accept as facts are just damned lies.

All right, there were several references made to my home State of Utah, talking about how relatively clean Utah's voter registration rolls are--clean of noncitizens--great, yes.

Do you know why? My State is not one of those that refuses to clean up its voter registration files.

Now, I don't know whether we know the sum total of all those who might have been registered to vote or whether they have been able to review all those. I don't know. I am not going speak to that.

But I will say that in the 18 months of the Biden Presidency, Utah had more incoming illegal immigrant traffic into the State than any other State in the Union, measured on a per capita basis.

So even though, over time, yes, we probably have pretty clean voter registration files, there is no telling whether that is still the case today. There is no telling whether that could change between now and this November's election, especially when people figure out that, hey, no citizen, no problem. Just go into a DMV, fill out a form, check the box, sign your name, and, all of a sudden, you are a registered voter.

Next, federalism: This is one of my favorite arguments that they make, and they make it over and over and over again. Both Senators from Rhode Island made the federalism argument today.

They talk about the fact that--part of what they say is true--the U.S. Government is a government of limited powers. James Madison, in Federalist 45, described this government, the one we operate, the one for which we make laws, as a government with powers that Madison described as ``few and defined.'' And the powers reserved to the States are ``numerous and indefinite.'' Unlike the States, which are governments of general jurisdiction--they can

legislate on anything just because. Anything that is not prohibited to the States, either by the U.S. Constitution or by their State constitution, they can do it.

We are not the same. This government is not the same. We have to have a specific reason to legislate, a reason that falls within Congress' limited enumerated powers, most of which--not all of which--can be found in one part of the Constitution that too often goes overlooked, article I, section 8.

But there are a handful of other scattered authorities throughout the Constitution, including the one that is most relevant here, and that is the one found in article I, section 4, clause 1 of the Constitution, that gives us the authority to establish rules and regulations specific to the election of Federal officials, namely U.S. Senators and U.S. Representatives.

That same provision, article I, section 4, clause 1, says, in the first instance, that the States will conduct those elections. And that is true. It also says the States will establish the rules governing the ``Time, Places, and Manner'' of those elections. And that is true. But then it also says, in the very same sentence, that Congress may at any time impose its own rules and regulations, not regarding elections generally but specifically Federal elections--Federal elections for U.S. House and Senate races.

And so, we have that authority. That authority is being exercised here. There is not a single credible argument that the SAVE America Act falls outside that authority--not one.

And it is very amusing. I talked about this a little bit last night. It is amusing to me that my Democratic colleagues in the Senate are making a federalism argument claiming that our authority is too limited--so limited that we don't have the power to enact this.

I am surprised by that for two independent reasons. Reason No. 1: Generally speaking, they don't like federalism. They are not fans of it. Ever since at least the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration-- arguably it goes back to the Woodrow Wilson administration--the Democratic Party has not been the champion of federalism, and that is really, really putting it mildly. It is a little bit like saying that Jack Daniels and Jim Beam are not fans of teetotalers or of the temperance movement.

I mean, look, these guys go whole hog into federalizing everything, and ever since April 12, 1937, they have had their way most of the time because most things they can now justify.

Franklin D. Roosevelt had Democratic supermajorities in both the House and the Senate. He bullied and intimidated the Supreme Court of the United States, which had been knocking down his legislative agenda, and threatened them right after his first reelection in the fall of 1936.

Franklin Roosevelt was mad because a lot of the laws that he had pushed through as part of his New Deal program--remember, the villain was the Great Depression. Franklin D. Roosevelt was going to be the hero, and his weapon of choice was going to be the New Deal programs dramatically increasing the size, scope, reach, and cost of the Federal Government, putting it in charge of all kinds of things. The Supreme Court, during his first term of office, kept knocking him down, one right after the other. You can't do that, can't do that, can't do that. And they were right.

A lot of them were relying on an expansive interpretation of the commerce clause, which is there to give us authority to regulate things or persons moving in interstate commerce, across State lines, as part of interstate commercial transactions or instrumentalities or channels of interstate commerce, interstate airways, waterways, and so forth.

Whenever they tried to get too cute with it and say ``Well, it goes beyond that''--anything that is sort of economic-ish and that involves money should do it--the Supreme Court kept knocking it down.

So what did Franklin Roosevelt do? I would imagine that he was one of these guys who probably played tee ball only as a little kid, never made it to baseball, and even when he was on tee ball, he was probably on one of those teams where they don't keep score because everyone is a winner. So he never learned how to lose like a gentleman. He got tired of losing and couldn't lose like a gentleman, couldn't accept the Constitution. So what did he do? He threatened to force the retirement of a bunch of the Supreme Court Justices whom he didn't like, whom he had named the ``four horsemen of the apocalypse''--not exactly Mr. Congeniality here--and threatened to pass legislation entitling himself to pack the Supreme Court, to increase it up to a tribunal as big as like 15 people.

Now, they had just barely moved into their marble palace across the street about a year earlier--no, it was 2 years earlier to the day. The Supreme Court had always been sort of the anchor tenant of this building or the subtenant--redheaded stepchild, if you will.

On April 12, 1935, this beautiful building over here opens its doors for the first time. They had been in there only 2 years when this Court packing plan began in earnest because F.D.R. never learned how to lose like a gentleman and wasn't willing to accept the Constitution as the ultimate outcome. So he just threatened them. He threatened them to the point that enough of the Justices flipped their votes.

On April 12, 1937--2 years exactly to the day they had moved into their marble palace--the Supreme Court of the United States rewrote the commerce clause giving Congress newfound power over basically everything. Not only could they regulate things or persons moving in interstate commerce, across interstate lines, as part of interstate commercial transactions, and things involving channels or instrumentalities of interstate commerce, but now they could also regulate anything and everything, any and every activity that, when measured in the aggregate while occurring in one State at one time, had a substantial effect on interstate commerce.

Yes, this is legalese. Yes, this is jargon for a very simple concept that just means Congress could now regulate whatever the hell it wants. Every aspect of human existence--labor, manufacturing, agriculture, mining, health, safety, and welfare--even occurring in one State at one time, was now on the table, was now Federal.

Democrats championed this the whole time. It was their Court packing plan that forced them to push that through.

So my point is this: It is ironic--one could say hypocritical and deeply so--for the party of unlimited Federal power that distorted the vertical protection of federalism and, with it, the horizontal protection of separation of powers--we have never retreated from that position, and as soon as we gave Congress the power to regulate anything and everything--that messed up the vertical protection of federalism--we started messing up the horizontal protection of separation of powers. Because no sooner had we as Senators and Congressmen gotten all this new power that we started saying: Holy crap. I am going to have to work a lot harder, and I am going to have to take a lot more votes that they are going to make a lot of people mad at me.

So they stopped making real laws, and they started passing platitudes.

It goes something like this: We hereby declare as a Congress that we shall have fair labor standards and practices in this country, and we hereby delegate to the National Labor Relations Board the power to make, interpret, and enforce rules carrying the force of generally applicable Federal law that will guarantee fair labor standards.

They do that over and over and over again. This is what happens with their version of limited government.

So don't talk to me about federalism. This is an area where we actually have a very specific Federal power, and we have a very narrow, nonabusive, nonabusable grant of Federal power to the Federal Government from the Constitution itself. This is not a federalism problem--not by a mile.

That leads to the next argument closely related to that one. The senior Senator from Rhode Island--who was on a roll tonight; I will give him credit for that. The problem is that in an hour and a half, he failed to make even a single correct point without the use of abusing the English language, the law, the Constitution, and common sense. Other than that, it was a great speech.

Having sort of exhausted his lame federalism argument, which doesn't work, he then said: Ah, but we have to

remember that whatever power is granted under article I, section 4, clause 1 to the U.S. Congress to provide rules and regulations governing the election of Federal lawmakers, that is only for Congress. And you look at the SAVE America Act, and it gives responsibilities to executive branch Agencies.

Well, no crap, Sherlock. That is how we do everything. Everything that is delegated to Congress, all Federal powers--when there is a Federal grant of authority in the Constitution, with very few exceptions--like the Commander in Chief power that is given directly to the President, not through the Congress--when the Constitution, throughout article I, section 8--and the same would be true in article I, section 4, clause 4--when Congress is granted a power, it is understood that we make the law, but the execution and implementation of that law is given to someone else.

This is not the same as what I was describing a minute ago where the lawmaking power is handed in the first instance over to an executive branch Agency. That is different. And that, by the way, is why we need to pass the REINS Act after we are done passing the SAVE America Act. I know the Presiding Officer is a fan of that legislation, as am I. Because anytime we are making new law under article I, section 7 of the Constitution, you have to pass through this dual gauntlet of article I, section 7. You cannot make a Federal law--meaning you cannot make a rule enforceable by the overpowering, brooding, omnipresence of the U.S. Government--unless you have satisfied this two-part gauntlet: You have the bicameral passage--House and Senate, same text--followed by presentment to the President of the United States for signature, veto, or acquiescence.

So this is totally different than that. We are not outsourcing the lawmaking power; we are adopting a single visible, understandable, intelligible principle-based legal standard and then handing over to the Department of Homeland Security for the execution of that standard, which we have made with abundant clarity.

So the Senator from Rhode Island says: Ah, but it gives Congress the power to do this, not the Department of Homeland Security or any part of the executive branch of the U.S. Government.

This is just nonsense. I have never heard somebody make such an argument. It is wrong. We do have that power. That power doesn't evaporate simply because we ourselves don't implement it.

Do you know what is funny here? It would be unconstitutional for us to execute it. Why? Because we don't have the executive power. We have a narrow piece of executive power expressly given to us on our Executive Calendar. On our Executive Calendar, we handle the confirmation of Presidential nominees, and we handle treaty ratification, but that is it. That is the extent of our executive power.

It would be unconstitutional for us to make a law and then also put ourselves in charge of executing that same law. That would put us in the position of the lawmakers in our mother country, who don't have separation of powers like we do. They are barbarians; that is why we left them. It is why we don't fly the Union Jack. It is why our dental care here is much better than it is there. It is why our food doesn't suck--because we left them a long time ago because we got tired of them and their hoity-toity butchering of the English language. But we got sick and tired of their lack of adequate separation of powers.

So those guys are involved in the execution and implementation of the law. We are not. We can't be.

So not only is he not making a good argument, he is making an argument that, taken to its logical conclusion, would be unconstitutional.

All right. Mass purges. The senior Senator from Rhode Island, still engaging in his paroxysm of paranoid fantasy, theorizes that somehow the Trump administration--and I am trying to imagine the animated characters running around in his mind's eye as he is saying this. Like, who is it? Is it Steve Bannon, Corey Lewandowski, Stephen Miller? I don't know who it is, but these very Trumpy members of the executive branch who are friends of the President are just going to come in and say: We cancel all of your votes. Mass purges. Let's do this just to be mean.

This is absolutely insane. That is not at all--there is nothing in the bill that would allow a mass purge of U.S. citizen lawful voters, and it is never ever going to happen.

There was one interesting point that the senior Senator from Rhode Island made shortly after making the argument I just refuted where he said there are zero dollars appropriated for them under this legislation. That is true.

Now, if the senior Senator from Rhode Island is suggesting that we could make the bill better by adding an appropriation, well, we can talk about that. I don't believe that is necessary. The reason I don't believe it is necessary is that we already have several legal regimes, several statutory frameworks through which there are Federal dollars already allocated to the States for their role in carrying out these responsibilities under laws like the NVRA and under laws like the Help America Vote Act. Now, if those are inadequate, which I don't think they are, but if they are, then let's have that conversation.

By the way, before we get to our next flawed argument raised by the senior Senator from Rhode Island, I have to get back to the federalism argument. I left out a key point of it.

In addition to the fact that the Democratic Party is about as into federalism as they are into kosher delis in Tehran--in addition to that, they themselves pushed a bill ironically called the For the People Act in the 117th Congress.

Remember, this was that lovely time between January 3, 2021, until exactly noon on January 3, 2023, when the Democrats held the majorities in the House and the Senate and also held the White House.

They pushed this bill called the For the People Act which purported to be drawing its authority from article I, section 4, clause 1. Now, not only were there lots, lots, and lots of executive branch Agencies-- like multiple executive branch Agencies and Departments--that were going to be empowered under that, thus eviscerating his own argument, but not one of them expressed a single reservation about that. In fact, every single Senate Democrat here at the time was fully supportive of the SAVE America Act. Not one of them ever, ever suggested they didn't have authority to do that.

This article 1, section 4, clause 1 is a thing. Ironically--and we don't need to go too deep into this, but they actually pushed the envelope of article 1, section 4, clause 1 so far that I don't think that could have been upheld as constitutional. I mean, they trampled on all sorts of State sovereign authority matters that went far beyond the realm of just Federal elections. They would have subjected every voting jurisdiction in the United States--it would have rendered every voting jurisdiction in the United States a preclearance jurisdiction. Whether you had ever had a history of racial discrimination or not, if you wanted to change your voting precincts, your legislative district maps, whatever it was, you would have to go and seek a ``Mother May I'' from a political appointee in the Democratic Party at the Department of Justice. It is wildly unconstitutional. They would have changed all kinds of things like voter registration deadlines. It actually strips the State legislatures of their constitutionally derived power to draw congressional district boundaries. So, for them to argue federalism here, give me the biggest break. This makes absolutely no sense.

He makes the argument that this bill, the SAVE America Act, is not about election security; it is about disenfranchisement. It is really cheap. It is a really low argument, especially because there is not a single word, not a single syllable, not a single letter in the bill that can justify that. I know that my friend and colleague from Rhode Island must not mean that. I don't know who wrote that speech for him or who told him he had to say that or whether he did it himself. Look, we are all entitled to a mulligan once in a while, and I will give him one here, but that is a doozy. There is literally no truth to it, and that is the hard part about arguments that have zero truth to them. It is that, when they have as little truth to it as that argument, it is

kind of hard to refute it. You have to build it up in order to knock it down, and that is hard too.

The next point that I needed to refute was really important, and this is where I am reminded of the limitations of my own handwriting. I can't read that one, so I am going to step forward to the next argument.

In each instance, both the junior Senator from Rhode Island and the senior Senator from Rhode Island--this being Rhode Island day with the SAVE America Act--they both kept relying back on the fact that it is already illegal. Yes, it is. It is already illegal for a noncitizen to vote, but the fact that something is already illegal doesn't mean that it is self-executing, that it is self-implementing, that it is self- revealing. It is none of those things. Some things are; some things are not.

This reminds me of an argument that I had to refute either yesterday or the day before. Somebody said--they compared it to laws governing the running of a stop sign. One of our Democrat colleagues said the other day, in a way that reminded me of what the two Senators from Rhode Island argued today, is that you don't have a law prohibiting people from running a stop sign at an intersection and then say: We now need another law prohibiting the running of a stop sign in a stop sign controlled intersection. They missed the whole point altogether.

The way that you could make that argument fair and analogous here would be to say, if you had a law prohibiting the running of a stop sign and then you had another law or maybe the same law was interpreted oddly by some creatively thinking judges as prohibiting the police from monitoring or watching intersections guarded by a stop sign, then, yes, that would be a fair analogy, and, yes, then we would need another law saying: No, it is not illegal for the cops to watch that intersection.

Another analogy here that I think is helpful just deals with another instance where you have got to prove who you are. I don't personally drink alcohol, but I know, nonetheless, the way this works is that whether you are a young person or an old, bald person like me, if you go into a liquor store or any other place where alcoholic beverages are sold, you are going to get carded. I know some people profess to being very flattered when they get carded because it makes them feel young when they do that, but my understanding is that you pretty much always have to show your ID when you go in there. They are just not going to take any ifs, ands, or buts. You have to show your ID.

This is the same kind of comparison. If we didn't have that law that you had to show your ID when you bought alcohol, then it would be impossible not only to enforce but even to detect violations of laws saying that liquor stores can't sell booze to kids. That is why we have the ID requirement. You have got to establish who you are. Then there are some recordkeeping obligations that go along with that.

So this is just really foolish to think for even a second that it is enough to say: It is already illegal. Back to our point earlier of: Oh, I know how we are going to save money. We are just going to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse. Great. You can't just say: We are going to do this.

Whenever you have a system of laws in place that are being broken, there is a grave risk that, by not enforcing those laws, you will cheapen the rule of law itself, not just the law that is being broken but the dynamic in which we as citizens, in a free Republic, choose voluntarily--most of us, mercifully--to abide by the law. We try to keep the law, and things work better when they do. When people break the law, there are generally consequences. When you live in an environment where the law is just disregarded and cast aside, bad things happen, but it gets infinitely worse--infinitely worse-- whenever, wherever. You not only say: We are going to just disregard it, but you put legal restrictions, legal impediments, in place so as to make it impossible not just to prosecute but even to detect where the laws are happening. Then, on top of that, it gets exponentially worse beyond that.

Whereas, here, it is not just any law, but it is the law that determines who is going to make our other laws. This is upstream from everything else. It impacts the legitimacy of this government. It is what is standing between us and untold amounts of not just election fraud but foreign election interference. So we can't pretend that this is academic, that this is a frivolous concern.

And I will not indulge for another minute the absurd suggestion that this is about President Trump and his administration wanting to just go in and disenfranchise an entire gender or an entire race or an entire political ideology or a set of party affiliations. Nothing in this law would authorize that. There would be hell to pay if anybody tried for it, and it is absurd to suggest that it is going to happen.

But even worse than that absurdity is the absurdity that goes along with saying our elections will be fair and free of fraud when we have had 30 million people living in this country who are not citizens, about 15 million of whom entered the country unlawfully just in 4 of the last 5 years under the open border policies of the Biden administration, where we have got a law that allows anyone, even a noncitizen, to apply in most States--the overwhelming majority of States--just by going into a DMV, checking a box saying, ``I want to register to vote,'' and signing their name, saying, ``Don't worry about it. I am a citizen, and I am otherwise entitled to vote.'' When we tell our own fellow citizens that not only are we not going to enforce that law but that we are going to continue to make it impossible to detect and prosecute and punish violations of that law, heaven help us all.

So, no, this is not about a party or a part of a country or this or that subgroup or demographic. This is about one thing; it is about citizenship. Yes, it is already against the law. So let's act like it. Let's allow for the law to be enforced. If we did the same thing with our drug laws, everybody would be taking drugs. It is almost like encouraging people to take drugs if you do it that way. But this is even worse than if you let our drug laws be unenforced, because this one determines who makes the laws. This one determines the legitimacy, or lack thereof, of our government. This, in effect, will disenfranchise Americans who will have their votes diluted and canceled out if we allow persons who are not citizens to vote.

We can get this done, and we will get this done. I was here yesterday and the day before that and the day before that and the day before that and the day before that, and I will be here every day until this is passed. I will not stop, and I know the Presiding Officer won't stop either. We are going to stay on this legislation. We will continue to debate. We will debate in the rain on a train, in a box with a fox-- anywhere, everywhere. We will debate this thing, and we will make them speak until they are tired. We will make them speak until every one of their arguments, frivolous or legitimate--I have yet to hear any of the latter, but you know, it could happen--have all been exhausted, and then we will win.

At some point, we will move away from the frivolity. At some point, we will stop making arguments rooted in science fiction, paranoid fantasy and move on to what the bill actually says. That is what happens when we are exhausted. That is what happens when people have to actually stand and speak and articulate their concerns with the bill. Sooner or later, you start being able to separate fact from fiction, from paranoid fantasy. And, at that point, that is where the magic happens. We can start to look for where the real points of contact are. If there are amendments to make to this thing, let's make them. Let's make it work as well as possible, but let's get it done. We are not going to quit.

We have promises to keep and miles to go before we sleep. We will not sleep until this is done.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask consent to answer the question through the Chair.

Mr. President, in response to the question from the Senator from Ohio, the junior Senator from Ohio--not to be confused with the very handsome senior Senator from Ohio--came to the floor yesterday. Now, the junior Senator from Ohio comes to this job with a unique background, a unique set of knowledge born of experience as the longtime chief elections officer of the State of Ohio.

As he looks at the SAVE America Act, he sees that there are two main components. Component 1 deals with voter ID, where you just show up with a photo ID on the day of election to prove that you are who you say you are, the same person listed on your voter registration file. Component 2 deals with establishing citizenship at the time of voter registration.

About 48 hours ago, a lot of our Democratic colleagues started stating publicly and privately, here on the Senate floor and outside of this Chamber, that they would be just fine if this were just a voter ID bill. And so the junior Senator from Ohio had this great idea. He said: Look, why don't we create a separate bill file. We will take the exact same text from component 1--that is the part that deals just with photo ID, photo ID to be shown by the voter on the day of voting, at the voting place, to show that the voter is, in fact, the same person listed on the voter registration file. After all, the Democrats have said they are just fine with the voter ID component.

So he gave a speech in support of it. I backed him up in a parallel speech. Then he offered it up, offered to pass it by what we call live UC, which is a mechanism by which you ask unanimous consent of all Senators to pass something. It seemed like a very good idea given the amount of bipartisan consensus surrounding the voter ID provision.

We were watching with bated breath, very much anticipating the answer. And, curiously, it drew an objection from the Democrats, articulated by the Senator from Oregon. But here was the interesting thing that I would say to my friend and colleague, the distinguished senior Senator from Ohio. At the time the Democrat objection was raised, the basis of the objection, as I heard it, was related entirely to component 2 that has only to do with proof of citizenship at the time of voter registration.

So I don't know. Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe this was an accident. Maybe he didn't mean to object.

I hope that we will continue to do those things. Perhaps tomorrow or in the days to come, we will try that again--because it drew an objection, but the objection didn't have any explanation as to why it would be unreasonable for someone to show up on the day of voting just to make sure that somebody else isn't impersonating you, that you are the same person you claim to be and the same person on your voter registration file.

I hope that that answers satisfactorily the question asked by the senior Senator from Ohio.

Mr. President, I appreciate the insights and enthusiasm offered by my friend and distinguished colleague the Senator from Maryland. I appreciate the right of every Senator to express his or her opinions, his or her thoughtful analysis in the legislative Chamber that we occupy.

This is part of what it means to be Americans, and it is a big part of what it means to be a U.S. Senator, to have the privilege to stand here and debate matters that are important to the American people, important to the ongoing health and vitality not only of our elections but also of our system of government, our Constitution, and the ideals embodied in our other great founding document, the Declaration of Independence, whose birthday we are about to celebrate in a few months.

Documents don't enjoy the 250th anniversary of their writing very often, but we are about to celebrate that. And on the same day, we will celebrate both the birthday of that document and with it the birthday of our country because that document ushered in the existence of the United States of America as a separate and independent sovereign country.

One of the many features of that country from the very day it was created nearly 250 years ago is the concept of popular sovereignty. Now, it is probably too many syllables for most folks to want to use it in one sentence, but of course we all understand that popular sovereignty--well, it sounds like a fancy term--refers to a very simple thing.

In this country, the government, the country itself, consists of the people. Those who have the right--the divine right--to govern are the people themselves, the citizens themselves. That, from day one, has been the concept.

That was different than things were in our mother country. In our mother country, we didn't have--we had elements of popular sovereignty that had

evolved over the years, but it was very different than it is here.

For that to mean something, we do have to protect the right to vote. And for the right to vote to mean anything, you also have to have fair and free elections. Now, when we have elections, we have a common understanding that I don't think anyone here disagrees with or at least wouldn't articulate their disagreement in public.

There is a very widespread agreement that those who vote need to meet the legal requirements to vote. And one of the most fundamental laws that we have is that in order to vote in U.S. elections, you have to be a U.S. citizen.

To my knowledge, this has never been controversial in the United States of America. And in fact, it is not controversial to this day, even in this Chamber. I think every one of us here, if asked, would agree: Yes, only U.S. citizens should vote in U.S. elections. It is against the law to do otherwise, and in fact, if someone casts a vote in a U.S. election who is not a U.S. citizen, he or she has committed a pretty grave felony offense against the United States.

So the question then becomes: If that is such a key element to who we are as a people, to the functioning of our government, to the concept of popular sovereignty that has been embodied in our system of government--first in the Declaration of Independence, later in the Constitution, and in our laws ever since then--then what do we have to do to protect that if it plays such an important role as it does?

Well, there is this old expression that if everyone is family, no one is. There is a corollary to that: If everything is urgent, nothing is. When you apply a label too broadly, the label itself loses meaning.

When you grant too many people the privileges, the incidents of citizenship--when those granted it include people who are noncitizens, then that is making everyone family, even if they are actually not. That, in turn, erodes what it means to be an American. It dilutes each lawful vote cast by an actual U.S. citizen.

Now, we just heard a laundry list of complaints, very, very similar to the laundry list of complaints that we have heard over the last 36, 48 hours--I guess, we are going on 72 hours since we turned to this bill just a few days ago.

Almost every argument we have heard against this from across the aisle has included some of these same elements, and we heard some more of those today from my friend and distinguished colleague the Senator from Maryland.

Among those arguments that she made today just a few moments ago had to do with--there were some arguments that had to do with the fact that this bill, as she described it, would somehow take away the rights of some American citizens to vote and that it would result in disenfranchising American citizens.

I wish to state at the outset, emphatically, that this is not true. This was neither the intention of the SAVE America Act nor would it be the effect of the SAVE America Act. This legislation, once it becomes law, will not disenfranchise a single American citizen, not a single one.

The only people who will be prevented from voting are those who are not citizens, those who are not allowed to vote in our system of government, and those who, by voting, if they were to vote, would be committing a very serious Federal felony criminal offense and with good reason.

So we have to be clear about what this does. This does not achieve, as she put it, erect barriers--barriers that would stop U.S. citizens from voting.

Remember what this does. We have the twin objectives that are upstream from everything that we are doing. We want to make it easy to vote, and we want to make it hard to cheat. To do that, we have two principal elements in the SAVE America Act. The first element would require voters to bring a government-issued photo ID with them to the polling place on the day of voting to show who they are, to demonstrate that they are who they claim to be and that they are the same person referenced in their voter registration file.

That is important for a number of reasons, including the fact that you don't want somebody voting in somebody else's name, and you certainly don't want somebody voting who is not supposed to be voting at all.

There are some people in the United States who might be citizens who are prohibited from voting for reasons having to do with criminal convictions, for example, or those who have renounced their U.S. citizenship. You wouldn't want that to happen. You wouldn't want a noncitizen voting, and you wouldn't want one person who might be a citizen with voting rights voting in somebody else's name--perhaps in an effort to cast multiple votes in the same election by impersonating another or otherwise. So that is a very simple principle.

That feature of the bill--having to bring a government-issued photo ID to the polling location on the day of voting to show that they are who they claim to be--is not controversial. It is certainly not controversial among the American people--not among Democrats, not among Republicans, not among members of any ethnic group, racial minority, gender, any part of the country. This is noncontroversial throughout the United States.

It is apparently even noncontroversial in this Chamber, whether you are a Democrat or a Republican. Over the last few days, we have heard Democrat after Democrat--perhaps not all of them but many of them-- including the minority leader himself, indicate that they are just fine with voter ID requirements. Yet last night, when the junior Senator from Ohio attempted to pass by unanimous consent a provision limited to the voter ID requirements of the SAVE America Act, it drew an objection from the Democrats. Now, when that objection was raised, the argument that I heard, that I recall, didn't have anything to do with objections to voter ID; they had to do with other things elsewhere in the SAVE America Act.

The second component of the SAVE America Act, of course, is a requirement that at the time a voter newly registers to vote, he or she must establish that he or she is a citizen of the United States.

An important point to remember here is that no one will be required to reregister. If you are already registered to vote in the United States, you don't have to go back and do it again unless and until you have some event that requires you to register again. Let's suppose, for example, that you move from California to Utah. Well, then, yeah, you would need to reregister in your new place of residence. But nobody who is currently registered to vote would have to reregister unless or until they move or until something else might require registration, and nothing in this bill would require that. So let's keep that in mind.

There are a number of arguments that keep being raised, primarily about the proof of citizenship requirements within the SAVE America Act. I would note here that in the citizenship component of the SAVE America Act, there are two basic components within that. One component deals with the obligation of the registering voter at the time of voter registration, and the other imposes obligations on State governments to coordinate and share information and data with the Federal Government as they undertake regular reviews of State voter registration files just to make sure that people who are registered to vote are, in fact, U.S. citizens.

Why is that necessary? Well, currently there are a whole lot of States--and they tend to be States that might colloquially be described as blue, meaning that they are run by Democratic Governors and/or have Democratic-dominated State legislatures--that are refusing to cooperate, to coordinate, to share data with the Department of Homeland Security and the entities within the Department of Homeland Security responsible for maintaining the SAVE database--an already existing database designed to help identify issues like this--like noncitizens who may have crept into voter registration files--and get rid of them.

But with all those blue States refusing to cooperate, to coordinate, to enter into a memorandum of understanding pertaining to the sharing of information, of data, it is a really vexing problem because it raises all kinds of concerns. How are we supposed to know when the law is violated, when a

noncitizen has registered to vote, if the Federal Government, which is ultimately the piece within our government system that has the records and the ability to ascertain citizenship--how are you ever going to expect that we can ensure that our laws prohibiting noncitizen voting in U.S. elections are being complied with?

Now, a few minutes ago, my friend and colleague the distinguished Senator from New Mexico made an argument on this point. He made a parallel reference by analogy to what might happen if somebody were saying ``We don't need additional laws confirming that it is against the law to run a stop sign if it is already against the law'' and saying that this is akin to passing another law making doubly sure that people don't run stop signs.

I understand the point, but it would be a fair argument or at least a fairer argument if the argument runs something like this: If in his hypothetical there were a system in place that legally and practically prevented police from monitoring tracked activities at intersections guarded by a stop sign, then, yes, that might be a fair, parallel reference, because that is exactly what we are dealing with, status quo, under a 1993 law called the NVRA--a law that, 20 years after its enactment, was interpreted by the Supreme Court--wrongly but conclusively, and that ruling remains in effect to this very day-- concluding that the State governments are prohibited--even where they suspect a registering voter is a noncitizen, they may not do anything to follow up on that person's citizenship. They may not request any proof of that person's citizenship even if they believe that it is suspect or lacking.

So that makes it analogous to this hypothetical of a supplemental law that would require or at least allow observation of the intersection guarded by a stop sign. If he is going to make that analogy, then that is how you make it fair, because that is essentially what is happening. That is directly analogous to what is happening here. It is as though we have laws saying that you may not run a stop sign, but State and local police are prohibited from observing traffic at any intersection guarded by a stop sign and may not issue traffic tickets even if they believe those things might be occurring because they are not allowed to watch that intersection. That is what is going on here.

But it is even worse than that because their own State governments are contributing to the violation of the laws, to ignoring it, because they refuse to share information; they refuse to hand over their data.

This is especially troubling for so many reasons, including and especially the fact that in a handful of States--I believe it is four or five jurisdictions, maybe four States and the District of Columbia-- they allow noncitizen voting in some of their local elections.

Now, I don't know why any jurisdiction would want to allow this. I don't know why any State would want to allow any local election within that State to include noncitizen voting. But if their State laws and their State constitution contain nothing to prohibit that, then that is their choice because there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution or in Federal law that would prohibit them from doing that.

Nonetheless, once they do that, it raises all kinds of questions that really do need to be addressed. For example, if they are voting, if you have noncitizens legally voting in some elections in four or five States and the District of Columbia, then that means they are registering to vote. They have voter registration files. Those States are asked: What are you doing with those voter registration files to make sure they are not cross-pollinating, that the same registered voters who are noncitizens are not also participating in Federal elections? And they are not sharing their information. They are not answering that question, which is a really, really important question. Their refusal to answer that question or to share data makes the need for this even more pressing.

Now, when we look at all of this, one of the many arguments that the Democrats appear to be raising over and over again--there are two of them that are especially common that I think need to be addressed head- on here.

One of the arguments raised over and over again is that if we require registering voters to provide at the time of voter registration proof of citizenship, then that is necessarily going to disenfranchise a lot of people.

Now, one number they throw around is something like 21 million Americans will be disenfranchised, will be unable to vote. Well, that by itself is not true. It is not supported. This is based on some studies indicating--based on surveys, they extrapolate that there are about 21 million Americans who don't necessarily have that requisite documentation or they don't know where it is at the moment or something to that effect.

Remember, by the way, any and every time any American citizen takes a new job, starts a new job as an employee for an employer on American soil or anywhere within the jurisdiction of the United States, they have to fill out an I-9 form. The I-9 form requires them to provide, before they may start that job, proof of U.S. citizenship either supplied by a U.S. passport establishing U.S. citizenship or, alternatively, an original, certified birth certificate accompanied by a government-issued photo ID and/or an original Social Security card. If you don't have those things, you can't start the job unless and until you can provide that documentation.

Now, those things would suffice under the SAVE America Act voter registration provisions requiring proof of citizenship, but that is not all that would suffice. We wanted to make it as flexible as it could possibly be, lest there be any credible argument that this would impose an undue hardship, an undue burden.

One could argue, of course, that even just requiring the same documentation every American has to provide whenever they start a new job would be fair, and maybe it would be, but we wanted to make it even easier to comply with that. We want to encourage those who are U.S. citizens to be able to vote. If you can legally vote, you should, and you shouldn't have these impediments. So we added a list of other documents that you could use. Certain other ID cards that have been established and recognized within the U.S. Government as establishing citizenship could do it.

Then we provided a catchall--a catchall that not one of my Democrat colleagues has even acknowledged even though they have been in the room when I have raised the argument, when I have cited it, when I noted what it does.

Some of the people hearing the argument over and over again still refuse even to acknowledge that it exists when they claim that unless you have a U.S. passport, you are going to be disenfranchised. Some of them will say that a passport will cost a couple of hundred dollars, so it is a poll tax; it is expensive; it is going to disenfranchise all these people. They ignore this provision.

The provision begins at the text on line 22 of page 12 of the SAVE America Act as passed by the House of Representatives, which is the legislation pending before us and that we are now debating. They ignore this every single time. They ignore it over and over and over again, to the point of being not only disingenuous but dishonest. These are, in fact, dishonest arguments because they overlook that.

This doesn't disenfranchise anyone. You need not shell out a nickel, a dime, a quarter, not even a penny or a fraction of a penny. You need not spend anything. You need not waste any time digging through, oh, piles of documents. If you can't find them and if you never had those documents to begin with--your house burned down or your dog ate them, whatever--not a problem. Why? Well, because we allowed them by a simple affidavit to provide an attestation. It is a personal narrative of, here is why I am a citizen--either based on the fact that I was born in such and such a city in the United States on such a date, or I was not born a U.S. citizen but I was later naturalized. Here is where I was born. Here is when I was naturalized. Here is the path I took to naturalization.

Either way, once you submit that--and that could be a brief paragraph or maybe a few sentences to describe those critical facts--you hand it over to the State election official, and the burden then shifts to the State to confirm or refute. Unless they can refute the facts that you allege, you are a registered voter, and there is no need for you to worry about it.

So this is absolute nonsense to say that you will be disenfranchised if you don't have your documents or if you can't afford a passport or whatever it is. This is just an absolute, total lie.

Look, in these more serene moments within the U.S. Senate, when things seem calm--and they are, in some respects, calm--it is not a time for us to assume that the arguments aren't real, that they aren't being made aggressively. This is not a time for drinking a pina colada. This is not a time for ignoring the endogenous and exogenous pressures that we face from every direction.

Speaking of endogenous pressures, I see the presence of my friend and distinguished colleague the great Senator from the State of Kansas, and he has got a message for us. I am going to interrupt my remarks and yield, with the permission of the Chair, to Senator Marshall, until the conclusion of his remarks, when I will continue mine.

Mr. President, thank you to my friend and colleague the Senator from Kansas for his observations. It is often helpful to have the diagnosis of an actual medical doctor when prescribing a problem.

We have an illness within our election system. Our elections have been rendered infirm or at least very insecure by some of these features that I noted just a few minutes ago, including the fact that the 1993 NVRA, as passed by Congress, has been interpreted the wrong way--but conclusively--by the Supreme Court as prohibiting the States from taking any voter registration file that comes through the NVRA, meaning an application for a driver's license made at a DMV in which the applicant checks a box and signs their name, saying: Yes, I would like to also register to vote with my driver's license application, and I certify with my signature that I am, in fact, a U.S. citizen.

Once that is done, there can be no further inquiry according to the Supreme Court's incorrect but conclusive ruling in this 2013 case called Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona.

And that, in short, is why we are where we are today. It is most of the reason why we need the SAVE America Act. It is because they said that the State cannot require--even where citizenship is believed to be lacking on the part of one or more applicants, as long as they have used the NVRA form at a DMV, the State can't do anything to follow up on it.

As I was noting a minute ago, some of these States do nothing themselves to follow up on the question of citizenship, and many of them--most of the blue States--have refused to share data with the folks at the Department of Homeland Security who run the SAVE database, which is designed to help weed out those who have been incorrectly, fraudulently, mistakenly, or otherwise placed in a voter registration file.

Again, if a State wants to allow noncitizens to vote in State elections, they may do so, and some States have allowed that in the context of some of their local elections as has the District of Columbia. I still know of no reason why they would want to do that, but they may do so if their own laws allow it because the Federal Constitution and Federal law doesn't prohibit them from doing so.

I will yield for a question.

It surprises me in the sense that it seems phenomenally unwise. It would have surprised me earlier in my lifetime. It would have surprised me even earlier in my time here in the U.S. Senate; yet something has happened in recent years that has eroded this longstanding, long-accepted assumption that only citizens vote in our elections.

I am not aware of any other country--certainly not any other country that any of us would want to live in, but probably not any other country that we wouldn't want to live in either--that would want to have or that would allow to have noncitizens vote in their elections because an election isn't much of an election if anyone can vote and you don't keep track of who is voting and you don't keep track of whether there are duplicative votes, especially as to what we are focused on here--persons voting who have no right to vote who, by voting, would not only be committing a serious felony offense but, by voting, would also be diluting the votes cast by lawful voters, by actual citizens of that country.

There has been a trend more in one party than the other, and you can guess which one. There has been a trend where people say, let's just let everyone vote, and toward thinking of a lot of things like this, like noncitizens voting in elections as being something of a victimless crime or perhaps, at a minimum, as sort of the required cost of doing business.

Remember how I said a moment ago how our mantra has been and should continue to be: Let's make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.

The Democratic Party has, in recent years, leaned so heavily on ``let's make it easy to vote'' that they often forget or, in some cases defiantly refuse, to finish the sentence. I am talking about hard to cheat.

Now, I understand the point. I understand that, perhaps, they are so enthusiastic to just make sure that everyone votes that maybe they don't care that some noncitizens might vote. I think this is very unwise, and it becomes especially untenable--especially indefensible-- when we now have an estimated 30 million-plus noncitizens residing in the United States, 10 to 15 million of whom entered this country illegally between 2021 and 2025 alone.

So, yes, that is shocking in some ways that a Democratic lawmaker in a State not too far from where we now stand actually introduced legislation trying to open up the franchise like that because when you do that, that is not a victimless moment. If you were to create that, you would be diluting the votes of lawful citizens. But, again, a State may do that if that State's laws and that State's Constitution allow it. It would be unwise.

Nonetheless, by doing that, whenever a State does that, whether for statewide State elections or just for local elections within that State, it creates a problem. It creates what I would think of as more or less a clear and present threat, one that, unless acted upon, will culminate in widespread violation of the law.

As I was describing a few minutes ago, for those handful of States that have expressly allowed noncitizen voting in some of their local elections, that means individuals have registered to vote who are not citizens. Once they have registered to vote, they are registered voters. What is to stop them from showing up and saying: ``I am a registered voter, and I would like to vote on election day,'' and they receive a ballot? And the way ballots in most States work, there is a ballot that has Federal elections and State elections and local elections all on the same ballot, the same document or sequence of documents.

So when the questions have been asked of those jurisdictions: What, if anything, are you doing to separate out those voter registration files from those voters who are noncitizens but, nonetheless, allowed to vote in local elections in your State, what are you doing to prevent them from voting in Federal elections?

Silence has been a response. A refusal to cooperate has been the response. That is chilling.

All right. Let's get back to what we were talking about a few minutes ago. They have been making a series of arguments against the citizenship obligation, the citizenship-related provisions of the SAVE America Act. And to repeat, we have made it really easy, far easier than the citizenship documentation requirements associated with new employment. If you are an American citizen and you have ever started a new job anywhere in the United States, you have had to fill out an I-9 form, and with that, you had to comply with a very rigid, specific set of document obligations. You had to establish either a U.S. passport, one that establishes your citizenship as an American citizen, or, alternatively, a U.S. birth certificate and government-issued photo ID or original Social Security card. If you can't do that, you are not going to

start your job unless or until you have been able to complete that.

Again, we made it a lot easier, very deliberately, to comply with the SAVE America Act. We have a list of other documents that are widely known and recognized by the U.S. Government as establishing citizenship, including a certain subcategory of driver's licenses that, in some States, these enhanced driver's licenses will affirmatively establish citizenship based on the documentation that was required at the time the driver's license was received. We included those.

But we also included this provision that makes it really easy for someone who has no documentation at all, is missing some documentation or even all of it. They can do so by an affidavit, an attestation just providing the basic details about how they became a citizen: when and where they were born; whether they were citizens at the time of their birth; and if they weren't citizens at the time of their birth, when and where and how, by what mechanism, they became naturalized citizens.

From the moment you do that, you shift the burden onto the State, and it is then the State's job to go and confirm or refute what you have done.

Now, if you were lying, they will figure that out. You won't be registered, and you may end up getting in trouble for having lied under oath with that statement. I assume most people wouldn't do that; very few would knowing it is a sworn statement. But if they don't conclude that it is false and conclude that it is true--it would be pretty easy to confirm once you have provided the names, the dates, locations--then you will be registered to vote. No additional documents, in fact, not a single document has to be produced by you, just that basic set of statements.

Again, that begins on line 22, page 12, of the legislation we are now debating. And yet over and over and over again I hear from my Democratic colleagues that are arguing against this how this is going to disenfranchise anyone who doesn't have a passport--as many Americans don't--and a passport costs a couple hundred dollars. And they then often make the logical leap, well, this means you are imposing a poll tax, something that has been prohibited by the U.S. Constitution for over 60 years.

This simply is not true. There is not a poll tax. There is not a single expense. This doesn't disenfranchise anyone, even if you don't have any documents. And it is far more permissive than what you have to produce every single time you start a new job in the United States of America as a U.S. citizen.

Here is another argument that is frequently being raised against the SAVE America Act. This is a fairly broad argument. It is a surprising argument for reasons I am about to explain.

The Democrats are waving the flag of federalism, purporting to be the champions--the newly invigorated champions--of State sovereign authority, of the authority of the States within our Federal system. That is what I refer to when I mean ``federalism.'' I am referring to the 10th Amendment, the broad concept of federalism, the idea that Federal Government is as James Madison described in Federalist No. 45, a government with powers that Madison described as ``few and defined.'' And those powers reserved to the States he described as ``numerous and indefinite.''

My Democrat colleagues, each time they bring this up, they use the same term. It is an awkward term. It is an outdated term. It is a misnomer, in my opinion. I don't like it. It is ``States' rights.'' This is a term that conjures images of George Wallace in the Deep South, the Jim Crow South. The Jim Crow policies that the Democratic Party, at the time, insisted upon--racist, oppressive, hateful policies designed to disadvantage Black Americans and to exclude them from many aspects of society, public life, and private life--indefensible.

They would often invoke this doctrine of States' rights, which was then and remains now a misnomer because States do not have rights; States have authority. Authority is kind of the opposite of a right. A right, in this context, is something that is a privilege, a protection against authority being misused against you. So they are kind of the yin and the yang. They are polar opposites of each other. They are not the same thing.

All right. I got that out of my chest. Now let's move on to the substance of this.

We will call this federalism or State sovereign authority. They purport now to be champions of State sovereign authority. This is really interesting. They say that the SAVE America Act--this very straightforward bill that just requires proof of citizenship at the time of voter registration and photo ID at the time you cast a ballot to prove that you are who you claim to be, the same person identified in your voter registration file--they claim that this is somehow incompatible with constitutional principles of federalism; that it is somehow unconstitutional as a Federal takeover of State authority to conduct elections.

Now, this argument would be laughable if it weren't so frightening and, frankly, hypocritical.

Remember that, in the first place, article I, section 4, clause 1, of the Constitution couldn't be clearer on this point. I don't know how any of these people could even make this argument with a straight face for this reason alone, let alone for the other reasons I am about to identify. But article I, section 4, clause 1 of the Constitution makes a couple things clear. First, they acknowledge--wisely, I believe--that elections would be conducted by States. They didn't want to set up a Federal election authority. It would be cumbersome. It would be unnecessary. It would be unwise--too much consolidation of power, especially because this was always supposed to be a government of limited and enumerated powers.

So they said that not only for State elections, which, obviously, State authorities would manage, but also for the election of Federal officials, specifically election of U.S. Senators and U.S. Representatives--Members of Congress. Their elections would also be run by State officials. They said that the legislatures of the respective States would have authority to establish the rules and regulations governing those elections, which they themselves would conduct.

But my Democrat colleagues conveniently leave out the following phrase in the same provision, in article I, section 4, clause 1, of the Constitution; that phrase being ``but the Congress may at any time . . . make or alter such Regulations,'' meaning those regulations, those rules and regulations governing specifically the State-run elections to choose U.S. Representatives and U.S. Senators. It could not be clearer.

So that is all this is. We are using our authority--our very specific, very clear authority--to prescribe those rules and regulations.

It is not just in the abstract that this makes sense, not just in that technical, grammatical sense that we have that authority, and that is what we are exercising here. This is exactly the kind of thing that should be--and I believe must be, perhaps can only be--wielded by the Federal sovereign, not by State governments because what we are doing here is to establish citizenship.

Remember, we do have the power to say this, and we have, in fact, enacted laws saying that only U.S. citizens may vote. To give meaning to that, to render it enforceable, we have the power to ensure that that law is being complied with.

And the U.S. Government is also uniquely in a position to be able to ascertain who may be a citizen and who is not a citizen. No single State is going to be able to ascertain that question, nor is U.S. citizenship itself a creature of State law, as it is of Federal law. It is exactly the reason why we have various government Agencies that are involved in this, and they are managed, more or less, through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which, among other things, runs this database that already exists called the SAVE database that is created for, in addition to whatever else it may cover, this very sort of thing, so that States sharing information with the U.S. Government may cross-tabulate, cross-check, their voter registration files against U.S. citizenship data, uniquely in the hands of the U.S. Government, and easily ascertain who is a citizen and who is not.

That is an especially important thing to have, especially considering the fact that we had between 10 to 15 million people come into this country unlawfully just in a 4-year period alone--separate and apart from those who may

have already been here, just between 2021 and 2025--10 to 15 million people entering this country unlawfully. And there are an estimated 30 million-plus noncitizens residing in this country in almost every State.

Given that almost every State participates in the NVRA, in almost every State, any of those noncitizens--whether they are here legally or illegally--in light of the Supreme Court's ruling in 2013 in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, any one of those people in any NVRA State--which is almost every State of the Union--can go into a DMV, apply for a driver's license, and by checking one box and then signing their name, they may register to vote.

So it is really important that we have that ability to do that. This information is uniquely in the hands of the U.S. Government, which is uniquely in a position to define and manage what it means to be a citizen and keep track of who is a citizen and who is not.

And yet these blue States continue, defiantly, to refuse to share information. They are actively subverting our ability not only to enforce Federal law but to even know when a violation has taken place or is taking place, and so that is stunning. That is what makes it all the more indefensible for them to oppose this and all the more laughable that they purport to be invoking the doctrine of federalism. They purport to be invoking the 10th Amendment, to be wrapping themselves in the Constitution by saying: This is an outrage; this is a Federal takeover of a State function. No, it is not. It is doubly and triply not a State function. It is a distinctly, decidedly, by designation of the U.S. Constitution, a Federal function.

Now, for the reasons why this is not just a laughable argument but it is also hypocritical, just a few years ago, many of the very same Democrats who now occupy this Chamber--in fact, nearly all of them were there at the time--and every single Democrat serving in the United States during the 117th Congress--that is the Congress empaneled on January 3, 2021, serving through January 3, 2023. Remember, that was a moment when the House and the Senate and the White House were all controlled by Democrats.

Every single Democrat in the U.S. Senate at that time--which are most of the Democrats who are still here--but every one of them that were here then tried to pass and supported a bill designated in the 117th Congress as H.R. 1, the so-called For the People Act, perhaps the most aggressive, intrusive, and independently aggressively overreaching Federal power grab over elections in American history.

Now, that bill was not a modest reform. Unlike the SAVE America Act, it was not there as an exercise of our very clear and very narrow power under article I, section 4, clause 1; nor was it, as the SAVE America Act is, a natural outgrowth of an existing Federal law--the NVRA--nor was it necessitated by a quirk in the judicial interpretation of an existing Federal law--the NVRA--as this is.

Remember, that is the only reason we are even here. That is the only reason the SAVE America Act even became necessary, is because of the NVRA and existing Federal law itself imposes obligations on States based on the way it was later interpreted after its enactment.

So, in other words, I say to my Democratic colleagues: If you are offended by the SAVE America Act as a supposed Federal overreach, not only is that indefensible as a matter of Federal constitutional law-- either the plain text of the Constitution or any Supreme Court interpretation thereof--but it also presupposes that if you are opposed to this, that you also think the NVRA is itself an unconstitutional Federal takeover of State election authority.

Now, if you think that, then we are going to have a very different discussion. But to my knowledge, not one of them has suggested or argued that the NVRA is unconstitutional; and if it is not, there is not a chance in hell that you can make the argument that the SAVE America Act is unconstitutional--not a chance.

Back to the For the People Act, H.R. 1 in the 117th Congress, it was an 800-page monstrosity, a blueprint for nationalizing every meaningful aspect of how States run Federal elections--that is, elections for Federal office--most importantly, elections for U.S. Senate and the U.S. House. And Democrats defended it by citing the exact same constitutional authority that they now pretend doesn't exist. That is Congress' power under the elections clause to set uniform rules for Federal contests.

Now, let's recall a little bit about what H.R. 1 actually did--I should say what it would have done had it been enacted. Mercifully for all of us, it wasn't.

Let's talk about what it did. It didn't just suggest a few changes. It didn't just suggest some curative protections to existing Federal legislation. No, this is an entirely different beast--and beastly, it was. It imposed binding nationwide mandates with Federal court enforcement on matters of sweepingly, stunningly broad application. Among other things, it forced automatic voter registration at every government interaction, overriding State processes, overriding State law.

It mandated same-day voter registration everywhere. This is a big issue because States have a broad range of when they deem it appropriate to begin or end--especially end--voter registration prior to any election. Many States consider it reckless and an invitation--a recipe for voter fraud if they allow same-day voter registration. Other States don't. You know, that has long been considered their prerogative to decide, but this would just have decided it for the entire country.

It would have required no-excuse absentee voting and minimum periods of early voting no matter what State law said. If some States wanted and previously had always had much more limited pre-election-day voting periods or none at all, it wouldn't matter. It completely eviscerated their authority to make such decisions.

It would have stripped State legislatures of their traditional role-- not just their traditional role, but their constitutional role--a role acknowledged in the U.S. Constitution itself and in the respective State constitutions--in drawing legislative district maps, specifically those mentioned in the U.S. Constitution--the congressional maps; and it would have done that by forcing the so-called independent redirecting commissions, taking away the authority that has always belonged to the States and to the State legislatures--as the Constitution--as designed, as the Constitution contemplates and ordains--and forced them to adopt these independent redirecting commissions whether they wanted to or not.

It would have severely restricted how States could maintain accurate voter rolls, banning removals based solely on failure to vote, limiting interstate cross-checks, and imposing cumbersome requirements before any cleanup of voter registration files.

As if that weren't enough of an insult to federalism, to State sovereign authority, to good government, local self-rule, or any of the other things that we hold dear in our constitutional system, H.R. 1 went even further than that. It would have legalized unlimited ballot harvesting by third parties. It would have barred States from requiring witness signatures or notarization on mail-in ballots and forced them to count ballots received up to 10 days after election day.

Now, any of those things in isolation is a powder keg, is a huge, huge policy decision. Efforts to change anything like that in State law in any State legislature would end up being a very significant debate, but this just bulldozed all of it.

Particularly, when it comes to ballot harvesting--this is troubling. Ballot harvesting, when coupled with the existence of widespread, universal mail-in ballots, allows for a special kind of mischief, which fortunately is thwarted in many States, like my own, that prohibit ballot harvesting. And where it exists, it causes a massive risk of voter fraud; and yet this would have prohibited the States from banning it--every State.

It would have weakened voter ID laws by allowing sworn statements in lieu of actual identification, even if State law would itself have required something more. It would have overridden State felony disenfranchisement rules, gotten rid of bans imposed by States on people voting based on a felony conviction--that, too, has long been considered the unique province of the States. This bulldozed over that.

And they would have mandated out-of-precinct ballot counting, preregistered 16- and 17-year-olds to vote, dictated rigid redistricting criteria, banned mid-decade map drawing, and imposed Federal standards for polling equipment, drop boxes, curbside voting, and much, much more. State election officials were even subjected to new Federal restrictions themselves.

There were also provisions in there that, as I recall, would have forced every voting jurisdiction, every precinct--local, statewide, or otherwise--to become the effective equivalent of a section 5 preclearance jurisdiction. Let me explain what that means.

Under the Voting Rights Act, there are a limited number of voting jurisdictions in the United States with a history of racial discrimination. Those States, under the Voting Rights Act--or those jurisdictions, once they were deemed to have engaged in this, they had to subject changes to their legislative districts to some preclearance requirements, meaning before they could take effect, some Federal officials would have to approve them.

This would have taken every jurisdiction of the United States--in the North, in the South, in the East, in the West--regardless of whether they had any tradition, any history at all of any kind of racial or other discrimination and said: All of you, before you make any changes to your district boundaries, whatever, you have got to come to Washington, DC, and receive a ``Mother May I'' permission slip from Uncle Sam.

These were not just incentives. These were not just slight modifications. These were commands steamrolling over policies that have long been deemed the province of the States.

Now, every Democrat in the U.S. Senate at the time justified every one of them by arguing that Congress could ``provide a complete code for congressional elections,'' thus superseding State law. And they were right in one respect, that at least one provision of the Constitution--article I, section 4, clause 1--gives Congress some power, but they were dead wrong about the wisdom, the legality, the constitutionality of using legislative reforms like that one to turn States and localities into nothing more than administrative subdivisions of the Federal Government subject entirely to the will and the whim of the Federal sovereign.

Compared to all of that, the SAVE America Act is the precise opposite of that kind of overreach. It doesn't touch early voting. It doesn't touch ballot deadlines, redistricting, or campaign finance. It doesn't render any district subject--doesn't make any voting district or precinct or State--much less all of them--a preclearance jurisdiction. It doesn't force States to adopt same-day voter registration or independent redirecting commissions, contrary to State constitutions and the U.S. Constitution. It simply enforces what has been Federal law for decades--most importantly, the Federal law that has been on the book for decades and says that only U.S. citizens may vote in Federal elections.

It requires basic documentary proof of citizenship at the time of registration with reasonable, very flexible, affordable--and, in fact, free--alternatives to those documentary requirements and a photo ID at the polls, the bare minimum commonsense demands that we make after years of open borders. It even helps States clean up their rolls by directing data sharing with the Department of Homeland Security.

If Congress could constitutionally force every State to count out-of- precinct ballots and legalize unlimited ballot harvesting under H.R. 1, it can certainly require proof that voters are actually Americans.

Now, of course, it can't do the former. H.R. 1 was blatantly unconstitutional for a whole host of reasons, not to mention its many policy defects. But my point is this: Every Democrat in the U.S. Senate saw no problem--no problem at all--with the constitutionality of H.R. 1. This is the equivalent of straining at a gnat while swallowing a camel. In fact, that comparison is almost an understatement. The difference isn't just in the magnitude, isn't just constitutional; it is also political.

(Mr. JOHNSON assumed the Chair.)

Democrats cheered Federal preemption when it was sweeping; when it expanded access and, in their view, as they saw it, their voter base; when they saw it as consistent with their own political interests; when they saw it as a chance to secure significant gains in elections.

They screamed federalism--or, as they put it, States' rights--the moment the focus shifts to election eligibility and integrity. And they scream it even where, as here, this is plainly well within what the Federal Government is authorized to do and plainly within the same statutory context that already exists, that has existed for decades, and that not one of my Democrat colleagues has called on us to repeal.

If the SAVE America Act is somehow unconstitutional as a Federal overreach, then the NVRA is a far worse infraction, and yet you don't hear them saying that because it is not true. This is selective federalism of the very worst kind. The same crowd that tried to nationalize American elections--truly nationalize them--is now engaging in this aggressive pearl-clutching exercise about State authority the instant we try to stop noncitizens from diluting the votes of actual citizens.

And, make no mistake, that is what is happening. That is what happens every time a noncitizen casts a vote. This is not a victimless crime. This is not a harmless infraction. This is not the voting equivalent of removing, however recklessly and wantonly and willfully, the ``Do Not Remove'' tags from a mattress.

The same crowd that tried to nationalize American elections is now engaging in this awful pearl-clutching about State authority the instant, the second, the millisecond we try to stop noncitizens from diluting the votes of actual American citizens. And the American people aren't buying this, nor should they.

Look, the Constitution does not recognize any political parties, and not only that, it certainly doesn't allow one party to federalize elections when it happens to help them and then invoke federalism as a shield when they are about to be held accountable, when people are about to be held accountable, when State officials are about to be held accountable for facilitating the wanton violation of Federal law.

So no--no--the SAVE America Act does not violate federalism. It vindicates the sovereign authority of the American people, the true sovereigns of our system, to choose their own government, and it does so with far, far more restraint than Democrats ever showed when the shoe was on the other foot, when they were pushing an 800-page monstrosity that was itself an indefensible Federal takeover of State authority.

Congress should pass the SAVE America Act without apology. This hypocrisy has gone on long enough. Their constitutional arguments here do not hold water--not at all, not for an instant.

You know, it is interesting that, as we stand here today, the Department of Homeland Security has gone unfunded, thanks to Senate Democrats, for over a month. They have been going without pay. How tragic that is that these individuals, who are working hard--they are having to work hard. They are not wealthy people. If you think of everyone from TSA agents to ICE agents and everybody else in the Department of Homeland Security continuing to have to work, these are not wealthy people. And there are so many of them who, in addition to not being paid, still have to work and have to work doing really hard jobs, sometimes risky jobs. This is not fair.

Then what is the parallel between the two? Well, I find it interesting that the same Department that has now been unfunded is the same Department that, among other things, oversees the SAVE database and the offices, the Agencies within the Department of Homeland Security that exist to help ensure election integrity and security, that are there to help States to review their voter registration files and identify those who are not citizens and thus shouldn't be voting. Those same offices, those same personnel themselves remain defunded.

During this discussion this afternoon, the Senator from Maryland was speaking about some of these incidents. Even though these things appear to be unrelated--on the one hand, the SAVE America Act and its merits which we have been debating, and on

the other hand, funding for the Department of Homeland Security--I sometimes think that they are not very unrelated at all, especially because they are defunding the very entity that could and otherwise would and should--and if we were able to enact the SAVE America Act, ultimately would--help protect our elections, to make sure that they are secure, to make sure that they are free from foreign election interference, which is exactly what happens when we allow foreign nationals, not citizens of the United States, to vote in our elections.

She referred to ICE agents, to ICE as a whole, as a ``goon'' squad. She accused ICE of being out there, deployed, and killing people. This is sad. This is tragic.

(Mr. MARSHALL assumed the Chair.)

Now, keep in mind there are about 22,000 ICE agents. A subset of those--about 6,000 of them--are responsible for apprehending and removing those removable illegal aliens that are in the country, so about 6,000 out of the 22,000. Then it is a much lower subset of the 6,000 that she might be referring to when she accuses ICE, a much broader Agency, of killing people and being a ``goon'' squad.

How many of those people were actually involved in any of the activity she has complained about? I don't know the answer, but it is not 6,000. It sure as hell isn't 22,000, and it sure as hell isn't 260,000. That is the total number of employees going unpaid within the Department of Homeland Security. So this is collective punishment at its worst, at its most indefensible.

She and her Democrat colleagues stand here today, continue over a month into this shutdown--not concerned, blaming the collective for what she is complaining about with just a few, before investigations are even complete and before we know where, when, to what extent wrongdoing on the part of any agents might have been involved.

This is wrong. It is not just wrong, but I sometimes wonder, is this, in fact, a willful attempt to subvert the enforcement of our laws--not just our immigration laws but also our laws that govern our elections, that protect our elections from foreign election interference? As they say in Latin, ``res ipsa loquitur''--the thing speaks for itself.

Before I wrap up, I want to thank our Republican leadership in the Senate. I want to thank my friend and colleague the distinguished Senator from Wyoming who serves as the Republican whip, and I want to thank my friend and colleague the distinguished Senator from South Dakota, the majority leader, Senator John Thune, for their leadership. I want to thank them for keeping us here through this weekend to keep us debating these matters.

We have no business going home--not for a weekend, not for a recess. We have no business going home until this is done. We have to get DHS funded. We have to get the SAVE America Act passed. And yes, they are related. For the very same reason we need one, we also need the other. And for this very same reason that they oppose one, they oppose the other.

But the fact is, the American people are not with them; they are with us. The American people understand that it is not fair to punish the collective for what may or may not be the wrongdoing of just a few. The American people understand that it is not an act of aggression, certainly not an unconstitutional overreach, certainly not an egregious abuse of power, or anything other than common sense to require people who vote in U.S. elections to be American citizens and to end this barbaric practice to which we have been subjected for far too long and which we are told: Yeah, it is illegal for noncitizens to vote, but you can't do anything about it. They have rendered it unenforceable. We are trying to fix that with a narrowly tailored piece of legislation.

Now, if one of them--even one of them--wants to talk about changes that we could make that would make them feel better about it, I am all ears. I have been listening to that for 3 days now--and longer than that, before we got on it. But since we got onto this bill about 3 days ago, I have been listening especially attentively for anyone to make a constructive suggestion from the other side or even an argument that is itself defensible in light of what the SAVE America Act actually does, in light of what Federal law actually says, and in light of what the U.S. Constitution actually allows, authorizes, and says, and I have yet to hear it.

Sometimes I wonder what it is that they actually want. Do they actually want our borders to remain open, as they were between 2021 and 2025? Do they, beyond this, actually want noncitizens to continue to be able to vote, even when we know that in some States they are openly allowing or even inviting noncitizens to participate in some local elections, even when they know that there are thousands upon thousands of noncitizen registered voters that have been detected just in the small handful of States that have, on their own, undertaken a review to see who is registered? They have found thousands, and that process is far from complete yet. How many more are there?

How long are the American people to be expected to suffer through a system that invites, allows, and perpetuates forces that will undeniably dilute and, by diluting, ultimately deprive them of one of their most sacred rights--their right to vote?

Finally, when we talk about constitutional protections of rights, my colleagues say again and again and again that because their right to vote is constitutionally protected--and it is, by multiple amendments, in multiple ways, by the Constitution--that that somehow means that you can't put any reasonable restrictions on it. Well, that is not true. That has never been true. We do have restrictions on them all the time. We also have restrictions on a lot of other constitutionally protected rights, and that doesn't mean that you don't have to prove who you are and that you have the right to do the thing you want to be able to do.

We already have to prove our citizenship every time we start a new job with the document requirements that are far more strict than those are here. We already have to divulge all kinds of information that is far more intrusive than anything required here.

In fact, on the subject of specifically constitutionally protected rights, the right to bear arms--do you know what you have to do when you want to buy a gun through a federally licensed firearms dealer? You have to provide ID, and you have to show that you are who you say you are. Then they run it through a database to make sure that, in addition to being who you say you are, that you also have the right to exercise the constitutionally protected right that you want to exercise by buying that gun.

It is the same exact thing. It is also a constitutionally protected right. And yet we allow it why? Well, because we have laws, and those laws decide how that right may be exercised, and we ban certain persons from wielding that right. For example, if you are an alien illegally or unlawfully present in the United States or you are a convicted felon or you fit into any of the other categories in 18 U.S.C. section 922(g), you are not allowed to purchase, possess, use, or probably even think about a gun. You will be prohibited from doing so.

They are apparently OK with that. If they are OK with that--and that is a constitutionally protected right--why aren't they OK with this, when here, when somebody else exercises that right, they are undermining your vote, my vote, the vote of every American citizen?

We cannot allow that to happen. I will continue to come back to the Senate Chamber every day--day after day, week after week, month after month--if that is what it takes to get this thing passed, but it will pass. We will not stop until it does.

Mr. President, I appreciate the passion that my friend and colleague the distinguished Senator from the State of Nevada puts into her job, into scrutinizing legislation. I appreciate the concerns she has expressed.

Now, if I believed all of the things that she said, well, just about any of the things that she said, I would be concerned too. Fortunately, for all of us, the things that she is saying about this bill are either, in some instances, incomplete, leaving out material information to complete the picture, resulting in a much different impact than has been suggested or, in other cases, they are completely wrong.

Go back to a few first principles about what the bill actually does. There are two basic precepts in the bill, and the fundamental purpose of them is to make it easy to vote and harder to cheat.

We do that through two principled mechanisms in the bill: One requires proof of citizenship upon voter registration, and the other requires voter ID at the time and place of voting.

Now, as to the citizenship component, contrary to what was being suggested briefly for a moment, you know, I would almost like to believe from some of her remarks that this would require Americans en masse to go and immediately reregister.

Perhaps I misunderstood her on that part, if I did, my apologies, but just so that there is no ambiguity at all, so that we are very clear on what it is that it does and what it is that it does not do, it doesn't require mass reregistration. If you have already registered to vote, there is nothing about that that is going to invalidate your voter registration.

If you move to another State or otherwise have to register to vote as you would if you have to move, for example, from one State to another, then you will have to register at that point. But there is nothing about your existing registration that is going to be nullified just because this bill becomes law.

And on the point of the proof of citizenship, there has been a lot of misunderstanding, some of it in good faith. Although the bill itself has just been characterized by my friend and colleague from Nevada as ``beyond bad faith'' and ``vile,'' those are pretty sweeping accusations, and I don't ever make those lightly on any piece of legislation. If I do, I am prepared to back them up. Those can't be backed up here.

There is nothing about this that is in bad faith. There is nothing about this that is vile. This is dealing with a very commonsense problem, a problem that has been many decades in the making--decades in the making ever since, in some ways, Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act, NVRA, in 1993, the motor voter law.

At the time, it was understood that we could allow participating States--which nearly all States participate--to set up a process whereby voters could, while applying for a driver's license at the local DMV, also register to vote. After all, it involves some of the same information to establish who you are, whether you apply for a driver's license and also when you register to vote.

There are some things that have happened since then that have changed the landscape.

One of them has been that 20 years after the enactment of the NVRA, the Supreme Court, in a case called Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, concluded that the NVRA preempts out the States ability to even request any type of documentation or other proof of citizenship. Even if they are aware of circumstances suggesting that some would-be voters are, in fact, not citizens, they are prohibited from doing so.

Remember, all you have to do under the NVRA form is sign your name after checking a box, saying: Yes, I would like simultaneously to register to vote. So, if the States are then prohibited from even inquiring into citizenship--attempting to document it, to prove it, or otherwise--then there is no way to make this happen. As a result of that, it leaves open this open, gaping wound. We now have an estimated 30 million-plus noncitizens residing in this country.

That leads to another development that is relevant to this.

Over the years, there were differences of opinion between the States as to whether, to what extent, and in what circumstances to offer driver's licenses to noncitizens. In some cases, they would issue them to noncitizens as long as they were lawfully here. In other cases, they wouldn't issue them to any. Over the years, it has evolved to the point where, in nearly every State, you can get a driver's license as a noncitizen; and in 19 States, plus the District of Columbia, you can get a driver's license even if you are in the United States unlawfully.

So, in light of that fact and in light of the Supreme Court ruling in 2013 saying that the States, even if they have reason to believe some voters are not eligible because they are not citizens--and they can't look into it further because the NVRA, supposedly, preempted them out. As wrong as I think that ruling was as a matter of statutory interpretation, it is conclusive, and it stands to this day. Then you add to that the fact that we had an estimated 10 to 15 million people enter the country unlawfully between 2021 and 2025.

When you add all that up together--and it becomes even more startling--you realize that, in several States, they made a decision to allow noncitizens to vote in some local elections. In those cases, there is still voter registration that goes into that, and those States, along with the most blue States in America, have refused to enter into any kind of memorandum of understanding or otherwise cooperate or enter into a cooperative agreement with Federal Agencies to ascertain whether, to what extent, and under what circumstances there might be noncitizens registered to vote in their States, nor have they been willing to cooperate with the Federal authorities who manage the so-called SAVE database within the Department of Homeland Security. They haven't been willing to show them any methodology or any techniques that they use in those particular States that allow some noncitizen voting to occur in local elections. They have done nothing to show how it is that they separate out those voter registration files from the voter registration files of those who are eligible to vote in Federal elections. This creates a genuine vulnerability, one that we couldn't, in good faith, just overlook and pretend doesn't exist.

Let me just say that, insofar as people find concerns with the methods that we have allowed you to use when establishing your citizenship at the time of voter registration, if we have left out some form of documentation that should have been included to make this easier, let us know. I would love to consider that. But the truth is, we were very inclusive with it.

One important thing to keep in mind is that this is not the only circumstance in which Americans are routinely required to establish their citizenship. Perhaps the most familiar one on the books currently exists in the context of labor and employment.

Every time any American starts a new job with a new employer inside the United States, he or she is required to fill out a form called the I-9. When you fill out the I-9, if you are an American, then you have to prove that you are a citizen. It is a pretty rigid, fairly inflexible standard. One technique involves showing a U.S. passport establishing citizenship. Another involves a combination of a birth certificate, a photo ID, a Social Security card, et cetera, but that is about it. That is about as far as the options go.

There are additional options that we have worked into the SAVE America Act, including, for example, that subset of Real ID driver's licenses. Not all Real ID driver's licenses establish citizenship. Some of them do; some of them don't. If you happen to have one of those that establishes that, you can accept that. Certain Tribal membership cards are also eligible because they establish citizenship. Not all of them do. We try to identify those that do.

But most importantly--and this is the part that often goes overlooked--when we hear comments from the other side of the aisle in this Chamber, it is that there is a catchall provision dealing with all of these circumstances and any deficit that we may have left out.

It also deals with the problem of those who maybe can't find some other documentation. Let's say, if you are

someone who has gotten married and you have changed your name after getting married and you have got the rest of your documents but you can't find your marriage certificate, we have got you taken care of.

The same provision in the same part of the bill also deals with individuals who may have lost all of their documentation either because it was eaten by their dog or maybe their house burned down yesterday and all of their documents are missing or because they never had them to begin with or their crazy Aunt Madge, for no reason at all, scooped up all the documents, took them to the landfill, disposed of them, and nobody can find them--or maybe you just never had them to begin with for whatever reason. These things happen.

This bill doesn't cast any judgment about these people. This bill doesn't desire, in any way, shape, or form, to disenfranchise those people or to make them ineligible to register to vote. In fact, it makes it incredibly easy.

The provision to which I am referring to often goes overlooked. More or less, universally, it goes overlooked from across the aisle. It starts on page 12 of the House-passed SAVE America Act, which we are debating right now. The bill on the table, at page 12, line 22, and following through the text going on to the next page, makes clear that, even if you are missing some of your documentation or even all of it-- regardless of the reason--and you want to register to vote, you can still do so by writing out an affidavit. It establishes a process whereby a stock affidavit structure could be recommended by a committee that has long existed to help facilitate some of these election issues. Each State would then fine-tune the process that they would utilize in their State whereby the would-be voter writes out a sworn statement, under penalty of perjury, outlining the circumstances that give them citizenship--meaning, if they were born in the United States or are otherwise natural born citizens of the United States--perhaps if they were born outside but to U.S. citizen parents residing abroad at the moment--and were at the moment of their birth, by virtue of the circumstances of their birth, entitled to birthright citizenship as of the moment of their birth, then they are natural born citizens. They can establish those basic facts.

Then the burden falls upon the State to confirm or refute the truthfulness of those things. States have access to databases by which they can compare and contrast what the voter says in the affidavit, saying: Yes, I don't have my documents, but I am a citizen, and here is why and here are the relevant dates or date ranges to consider. It becomes the State's burden. No American citizen need shell out a single dollar.

This is one of the other arguments that I frequently hear raised: that not every American has a passport.

Well, yes, that is true.

They also go on to say: Well, a passport costs money--about 200 bucks.

That is also true.

Nobody should have to go out and get a passport just to vote. If they have got one, great--it makes it easy to establish citizenship--but you don't need to have one. You don't have to shell out a single dime to register to vote under this bill, nor do you have to go out and get duplicate documents or be left out in the cold because you can't find your documents or they never existed or you never had them or your house burned down. Whatever the case, this is taken care of; but this, too, was ignored by my friend and colleague, the distinguished Senator from Nevada.

This question is startling because we hear over and over again how people are going to be left out in the cold. Yet every American who has ever had a job as an employee with an American company in the United States of America has had to establish their citizenship under standards using documents that are far less forgiving, far more rigid, far less flexible than what we allow here.

Now, look, it is theoretically possible--not likely but theoretically possible--that there are other ways of establishing citizenship not yet contemplated in this bill that would still do the job. If so, bring those ideas forward. Help us improve the bill. We would be happy to do it. I think we have made it as easy as we possibly could have. I would love to hear those ideas, but that is not what we are hearing. They are, instead, wanting to engage in scaremongering tactics in order to make people fear that they are suddenly going to be disenfranchised; that they are suddenly going to face what some are really disingenuously calling a poll tax and dishonestly suggesting that this will cost anyone money. There is not a reason for anyone to shell out a single dime, a single nickel, a single penny--or fraction thereof--in order to register to vote.

So, when we look at the proof of citizenship, it is simply not fair to point to any one of these documents in isolation and explain the reasons that some people might not have them, might never have had them, might have lost them, and why it is such a travesty that people will be disenfranchised without them unless they either spend money or spend days or weeks hunting down all the relevant documentation because there are other, easier ways to establish that. If you have got ways of making it even easier, while satisfying this demand that we make sure that only those who are citizens are voting, let's bring them forward.

It is curious, moreover, in getting back to the States--not just the States in which they currently allow lawful votes to be cast in some local elections by known admitted noncitizens. But beyond that, there is a wide range of States, mostly with Democrat Governors and/or Democrat legislatures, that are refusing to cooperate at all with Federal authorities to share anything about their voter registration files, to share the information to make sure that those voting in Federal elections are, in fact, U.S. citizens.

Now, look, this is part of the cooperative federalism model that is built into the Constitution itself. There are certain responsibilities that belong to the U.S. Government, and it is as equally important to respect those powers that are distinctively, unavoidably, necessarily, and by the text and structure of the Constitution, Federal. It is important to keep those in Federal hands just as it is important to reserve to the States the powers that are reserved to the States, not under Federal and not prohibited to the States by the Constitution. Both are equally important to federalism, and bad things happen when we disrespect either.

Under article I of the Constitution, we have the power--it is our authority, and I believe it is our duty--to set basic terms and conditions relevant specifically to these Federal elections--elections for the U.S. House of Representatives and elections to the U.S. Senate. Those are, after all, Federal races.

And which government is it--the State or local level?--that ascertains and has records sufficient to establish, confirm, or refute citizenship?

Well, it is this government.

In fact, one of the very first provisions of article I, section 8 of the Constitution--outlining Federal power by outlining the powers granted to Congress--involves laws dealing with, you know, immigration, naturalization, and citizenship. It is this government that is the only Government of the United States--no one State has the capacity to do that--to establish or refute the existence of citizenship.

So why are so many States that happen to be run by the Democratic Party refusing entirely to cooperate--to enter into memoranda of understanding or otherwise cooperate--with Federal Agencies whose job it is to go through and figure out who is and who is not a citizen for the purpose of voting in Federal elections?

That, too, is another reason we need the SAVE America Act. It is because this is chaos if we don't do that. If we don't do that, then our laws are dead letter. Our law is saying that only U.S. citizens may vote, and if a non-U.S. citizen votes in a Federal election, he or she has committed a serious felony offense.

People often will point to the dearth, the paucity, the rarity of instances in which voter fraud--particularly voter fraud based on noncitizen voting--has been detected, charged, fully prosecuted, and resulted in a conviction. Yes, these are few. These are very, very few overall that have happened, and there are reasons it is very few. When you have a system of laws in place, it makes it very easy to register to vote even for those who might not be citizens, and it makes it impossible for a

State to even inquire, even where actual doubts exist, as to someone's citizenship. You make it almost impossible to detect and very, very difficult to prosecute.

Voting is, moreover, something that happens in a finite time and place. Most of the time, by the time it all happens, the matter is moot, and so it can be difficult to move on.

This is why sometimes I will compare this to when people say that we don't need to put these procedures in place because it is already against the law for noncitizens to vote and therefore they don't vote and that is why it is so rare.

That is a little bit like saying we don't need laws that require liquor stores to make people show ID before they buy alcohol because we already have laws prohibiting the sale of alcoholic beverages to children. If we didn't have ID laws or record keeping requirements in place for such things, that, too, would be very, very difficult--close to impossible--to detect and enforce and prosecute and result in convictions.

So, look, this debate will continue. I look forward to hearing any contributions, any suggestions as to how we could make it better, more inclusive. But the status quo in which we simply pretend that this does not happen is untenable.

We already know, based on the handful of States that have started their own investigations, that there are thousands just in the last year or two alone. We learned of thousands of voter registration files that have existed that have involved noncitizens.

With as many noncitizens as have entered this country recently and the development of our laws, it would be folly, it would be morally irresponsible for us to assume this does not happen.

But let's keep our debate focused on truth, on facts, on what the bill actually says and not on what it doesn't say.

Mr. President, I appreciate the passion and the remarks provided by my friend and colleague the distinguished Senator from Delaware.

I do feel the need to respond to a couple of things, and a couple of things that were said previous to that by the Senator from Michigan.

With regard to the Senator from Delaware, there are a number of claims made that are very serious; and because they are very serious, they need to be responded to immediately.

She used terms like ``poll tax,'' ``Jim Crow 2.0,'' talking about adding costs as if we are charging someone to be able to have ballot access to be able to vote, which would be a poll tax. We ended that some 60 years ago by a constitutional amendment. This is not that.

Not only are we not charging someone to vote, but we are not charging someone to register to vote; nor are the documentary requirements in place anything that would cost any individual any money at all. It would not cost them a single penny because even if you don't have every document that you need in order to establish citizenship, something that is already required by a whole host of other laws--familiar to most Americans would be in the labor and employment context, where every time you start a new job as an American citizen, in the United States as an employee, you have to fill out an I-9 form, and you have to provide a very specific set of documents to establish citizenship. You may do so with a U.S. passport establishing citizenship. If you don't have a U.S. passport, you may do so with a birth certificate, together with a photo ID. A Social Security card can also come into play, but it is a fairly limited set.

What we have established in this bill is far more flexible than that. We have added a bunch of other documents. We tried to be as expansive and as inclusive as humanly possible in order to do

that. And then we provided a failsafe--a failsafe that I have yet to hear any of my colleagues across the aisle refer to when making these very aggressive accusations that this is a poll tax, that this is Jim Crow 2.0, or that this is going to disenfranchise women or people of particular racial minorities. It is just not true.

They are ignoring the existence of the provision that begins on line 22, page 12, of the bill and continues onto the next page, which says that if for any reason or no reason at all you don't have the necessary documents--any of them or all of them; you have none of them--you can still handle this by an affidavit that you can write out, thus putting the burden on the State to confirm or refute the underlying facts establishing your citizenship, whether citizenship through natural born citizen status, by virtue of the circumstances at your birth, at the time of your birth, making you a citizen or the circumstances that led to your naturalization; you were a naturalized citizen. That does not cost anyone a single dollar, and it puts the burden on the State to track down the necessary background so that the State can certify you.

So these arguments are not only missing the point; they become aggressively wrong to the point of just being flatout false, demonstrably false.

So we can hear this over and over and over again, but it doesn't change the fact that, in the bill, nobody is charged a thing to vote-- not one person. And so when we hear about this being costly, that just isn't true.

Likewise, another comment was made by my colleague from Delaware referring to a vote-by-mail provision, referring to some more sweeping changes that are made in a separate amendment that are not part of this bill right now. This bill has two principal provisions. One deals with establishing proof of citizenship at the time of voter registration. The other deals with photo ID at the time of voting.

This one doesn't do that. Yes, one or more amendments have been filed that would expand that to include some significant restrictions on mail-in balloting. That is not what is being debated on the floor right now. I have no objection to anybody wanting to raise those now, given that the amendments have been filed and there has been some talk of this. But just to be clear, the bill on the floor doesn't contain those.

I also need to respond to a couple of the more egregious points that were made by the preceding Senator, the Senator from Michigan. Among other things, she repeated some of the same false accusations that this would somehow disenfranchise married women. It absolutely, emphatically, would not. In addition to making it very easy for someone who has all the other documentation but maybe doesn't have a marriage certificate backing up the name change or maybe they are missing all of them, again, you go back to page 12, line 22. Any person, whether they have changed their name or are missing some of their documentation or all of it, may establish it by affidavit, putting the burden back on the State elections official.

The Senator from Michigan also made some curious claims with regard to the Constitution, with regard to federalism and the relationship between States and the Federal Government. Among other things, she insisted that the Founding Fathers--those who wrote the Constitution, those who ratified it--were emphatic about the fact that they did not want, as she put it, the Federal Government running elections. Well, there is some truth to that, but her ultimate conclusion is 180 degrees opposite of what the Constitution says and what they did and what the words say, though it is very important for us to do this to make sure that we are talking about the same things.

So if you go to the Constitution--go to article I, section 4, clause 1. It doesn't talk about them because it doesn't need to talk about them, the States conducting their own elections for State offices. That goes without saying that the States are in charge of that. But it does talk--in article I, section 4, clause 1--about the fact that the State governments will be in charge of setting up rules and regulations governing the conduct of elections for Federal officials. And it also says, right after that, in the very same sentence, ``but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations,'' and that is what we are doing here.

Because these involve Federal offices, we have the authority to set important terms and conditions specifically for Federal offices. It is not that we are encroaching on any constitutional power; this is our power. It may lay dormant insofar as we choose not to exercise it. But it is not currently dormant. In fact, we legislated on a number of occasions; and there are at least four or five, maybe six major pieces of existing Federal law that deal specifically with the States' conduct of Federal elections, separate and apart from another very serious Federal criminal penalty that makes it a felony for a noncitizen to vote in a U.S. election.

So in all these respects, the Congress can, it may, it is expressly authorized to legislate, and it has indeed legislated. Among other things, it legislated with the NVRA, passed in 1993.

It is the NVRA specifically and the manner in which it has been interpreted by the Supreme Court and implemented that necessitates these provisions--specifically, the citizenship provisions--of the SAVE America Act because but for the Supreme Court's ruling in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona in 2013, a case decided some 20 years after the NVRA was enacted by Congress in 1993, the Court in that case said the States may not even inquire into someone's citizenship, may not require proof of it even where they suspect that some voters might be noncitizens.

Now, that interpretation was wrong. It was contrary to the text, to the structure, to the original public meaning of that statute. It was wrong, but it is nonetheless conclusive. It is a majority opinion of the Supreme Court. It hasn't been overturned. And that is why this is necessary.

So to call this a federalism problem, to call this an overreach by the U.S. Government into the exclusive domain of the States, is literally not true. Why? Well, because in the first place, the Constitution itself makes it Federal, and it is necessarily Federal. I would add to that that that is even more important here because this bleeds into another one of the Federal Government's exclusive powers and exclusive abilities; namely, the ability to identify and ascertain the citizenship of any American citizen.

That is not the role of the States, nor do the States have the comprehensive databases that the Federal Government does have. The Federal Government has the ability, conclusively, to determine whether or not somebody is a citizen. The States do not, and that is yet another important reason for us to make that determination.

It is also relevant that this is where we get into trouble with a number of these blue States--the Democrat Governors and Democrat legislature States--that are refusing even to talk to the Federal authorities who run the SAVE database within the Department of Homeland Security.

Remember, it is against the law for a noncitizen to vote in a Federal election, and that is why we have these laws and these systems and this database, the SAVE database, already set up. Yet a number of these blue States--a whole lot of them--are refusing even to talk to Federal authorities, even to share with them what, if anything, that they are doing to make sure that noncitizens are not voting in U.S. elections. This has become a problem of especially great concern in recent years given that, in some States--a handful of at least four or five States and the District of Columbia--now have in place systems where, in some local elections within their State's jurisdiction, noncitizens are openly, by State law, allowed to vote in those elections.

Therefore, when they register to vote, they have a voter registration file. Basic questions have been asked of them: How do you differentiate those who are noncitizens who have registered to vote in your State, and how do you make sure that they don't get ballots to vote in a Federal election; for example, for a U.S. House of Representatives race or a U.S. Senate race?

They have refused to answer the question. They have refused to cooperate. They have hidden these details. These are important details, details that we have constitutional authority,

a moral obligation, and a legal obligation to look into to make sure that our laws are faithfully executed, and they refuse utterly to cooperate. If that is not chilling, I don't know what is.

My friend and colleague from Michigan also implied that there is a--I don't know--some sort of de minimus, marginal concern, in her State and every other State, about noncitizens registering to vote.

Oh, it happens every once in a while. Somebody gets in there. We remove them.

But let's remember--I looked up some articles on this. I have one right here from a publication called the Michigan Bridge. One of the ways that they found a handful of noncitizens registered to vote was in a sort of haphazard way. They found 15 just by doing something very simple. They compared a list of people who had gone into court after being summoned for jury duty. Jury duty, remember, typically turns on what they call the wheel, a random selection from among registered voters in the jurisdiction. You are called up if you are a registered voter, randomly, to serve on jury duty.

Periodically, in Michigan and in many other States, people will show up for jury duty. There are all kinds of tricks that people use to try to avoid jury duty if they don't want to. This one may or may not be a trick in some circumstances, and in many circumstances it wasn't. People were truthfully saying: I am not a citizen; therefore, I may not, must not, cannot, will not serve as a juror.

So somebody came up with the idea: Let's compare a list of--I don't know--250 or so who happened to have made that argument; then they compared them against Michigan's voter registration database. And they found that at least 15 of those individuals were noncitizens who had registered to vote. That is a far cry from saying that there are only 15 noncitizens registered to vote in the State of Michigan, when you consider the haphazard, random way in which they found this out. It would suggest not only that there could be more but that there likely are a lot more because most people aren't getting called in for jury duty, and most who are aren't necessarily invoking this defense of: I can't serve; I won't serve; I may not serve because I am not a U.S. citizen.

Finally, with regard to the federalism point, I find it very curious that this argument continues to surface, and it surfaces, in particular, from our Democratic colleagues. And the reason I say that is that, all of a sudden, they are very concerned about federalism, about maintaining the sanctity of the distinction between that which is State authority and that which is Federal.

That is important to me. I focus on a few things more than that. I think the core structural provisions of the Constitution--the vertical protection that we call federalism and the horizontal protection that we call separation of powers--are as important as any other feature in the Constitution. And when we deviate from those, we cause all kinds of ripples downstream. So I am very sensitive to these issues. I want to avoid any semblance of trampling on States' sovereign authority. This, sir, is not that--and especially when we hear this from those who, just a few years ago, during the Congress that ranged between January 3, 2021, and January 3, 2023, in which both Chambers of Congress were controlled by Democrats and we had a Democratic President, President Biden.

During that time, they supported legislation known as H.R. 1. Now, if you want to see a Federal takeover of elections, H.R. 1 was that. It was vast. It was sweeping. It covered all sorts of things that the Federal Government has no business taking over in elections. Among other things, it would have designated every single voting jurisdiction in the entire United States of America, regardless of what part of the country they were in, regardless of what, if any, history they may have had with past de facto or de jure discrimination or segregation of their State, subjected them all to preclearance; meaning, anytime they passed any law affecting the way votes were cast, precincts were drawn or otherwise, they would have to go to a Democratic political appointee inside the Department of Justice to seek a ``Mother, may I,'' an advance blessing from the Federal sovereign, before they could make those changes.

That is a violation of federalism, and that is something that, last I checked, every Democrat who now serves in the Senate who was here at the time supported. So I am sorry. I am surprised that they would make a federalism argument now in reference to a bill that focuses solely, exclusively on powers that the Federal Government does, in fact, have.

And in fact, the only reason this bill is necessary is because of existing Federal law--the way it has been interpreted and the way that it is being implemented. That is the only reason we need any of this. That is not a federalism problem; that is inappropriate exercise of Federal power.

We do just as much violence to federalism when we deny to the Federal sovereign the ability to exercise Federal power as we do when we do the same to the States.

Madam President, I want to thank my friend and distinguished colleague, the Senator from Ohio, for his observations, for his insights on this. This is one of many true talents we have in the Senate. He is particularly well qualified in this area, given his experience in the State of Ohio with mastering the election laws of that State and the Federal election laws that overlap with State election laws.

I am not sure there is anyone in the Senate, currently or who has ever served here, who has a greater knowledge of these laws and the ways that they intersect.

For the same reasons articulated by the Senator from Ohio, I think this is an exceptionally good idea. It is not every bill where it makes sense to separate out a provision, try to pass that provision on its own, separate from the rest of the text of the bill, but this is one of those instances where it makes sense.

Don't get me wrong. Neither I nor the Senator from Ohio are suggesting that we still don't need the rest of the SAVE America Act. That is not our point.

The point is that these are separately divisible such that they could be enacted separately, and insofar as there is a greater degree of consensus with regard to the voter ID component of the SAVE America Act than there are with regard to the citizenship components, it makes sense for us to get this done now.

Let's pass it. Let's pass it right now. Let's pass it unanimous consent. Let's make this law, and then we can proceed back to deal with the rest of the issues within the SAVE America Act.

This is what progress looks like. This is what consensus building looks like.

And I thank my friend from Ohio for raising this.

Look, no matter how you feel about the rest of the provisions of the bill, it is not too much to ask somebody to show who they are when they show up on voting day. That provision is very simple.

Let's get this passed. Let's get it done right now.

Will the gentleman yield for a question?

--inaccuracy on the bill.

No. No. It is not one. It is many. I am going to focus on--

If you read the text at the beginning on page 12, line 22, which makes clear--

I am asking a question, sir. Are you not willing--

You yielded.

Mr. President, we have begun what will be our third day of debating the SAVE America Act, just over 48 hours ago. We voted to proceed to this bill, and we have been debating it for a couple of days, now entering our third 24-hour period of debates.

I want to make a few observations to some of the arguments that I have made and respond to some of them; in particular, respond to some of the arguments that I have heard made just in the last couple of hours.

We have heard a number of arguments. Nearly all of them that come from the other side of the aisle deal with something that is either easily addressed in ways that would not require any change to the legislation before us, or, more commonly--in fact, almost entirely-- what we are hearing are arguments that overlook or even blatantly mischaracterize key features of the legislation.

The distinguished Senator from Colorado who spoke just a little while ago, made a number of accusations against the legislation. Now, they are not materially different from some of the other arguments that have been made this evening, but they were a little bit more strident coming from the Senator from Colorado than they have been from some others.

He repeatedly referred to this legislation, in ways described it using adjectives like ``shameful,'' a lot of characterizations of the legislation as being somehow evil or malign. But as important as anything, he continued to repeat characterizations of the bill that are just lies. And I wish I didn't have to use that term. It is a very blunt term, but these are lies. It is as though he is staring straight into the noonday Sun and, while looking at the Sun with a cloudless sky, saying: It is midnight. There is no Sun visible.

A lot of this--not all of it, but a lot of it--traces back, in one way or another, to this refrain about how this law is alternatively either Jim Crow 2.0; that it disenfranchises women; that it disenfranchises racial minorities, persons of color; that it disenfranchises 20, 21 million people; that it disenfranchises anyone who lacks any documentation, anyone who, after getting married, goes through a name change if the marriage certificate can't be found along with the other documents.

Arguments that you would have to get a passport in order to vote, having to shell out a couple hundred dollars, which is about what a passport costs. I think it is $185 without any expedited fees, more than that otherwise.

On that basis, these arguments often culminated in the point that this is somehow a poll tax because if you have to spend a couple hundred bucks getting a passport or otherwise procuring documents, without which you couldn't register to vote, according to them, then you are disenfranchised; therefore, this is a poll tax. Poll taxes were outlawed by constitutional amendment over 60 years ago, and therefore this is bad.

There are a lot of other arguments, but let's just stop right there and let me address--I think I can address nearly all, if not all, of those arguments by referring to one section of the bill that I have oft repeated, oft cited, oft quoted. And yet no matter how many times I cite it, paraphrase it, quote it, or refer my colleagues across the aisle to its provisions, they seem to ignore it.

Many of the same people have continued to repeat this lie, even after they have been in the room here in the Senate Chamber when I have made the argument, and here is the argument that overcomes most, if not all, of the immediately aforementioned arguments.

This legislation doesn't require you to have any of the documents that they reference. Ideally, you should have them. And, in fact, most Americans do have them, and most Americans are required to use them, from time to time, in other contexts.

Perhaps the most common of those contexts is in the employment context. When you start a new job--whenever any American citizen starts a new job with a new employer in the United States--you have to fill out a form called the I-9. The I-9 requires you to establish your U.S. citizenship.

Now, if you are not a U.S. citizen, then you don't have to produce that because you have to produce something else. You have got to produce a visa and establish the link between the visa that you have, your authorization to work, and your authorization to work in that particular job. So that is par for the course if you are not a U.S. citizen because you have got to establish a very specific type of work permit or an authorization based on your visa. But if you are an American citizen, you still have to pony up with documents every time you begin new employment as a new employee with a new employer in the United States.

You have to prove you are a citizen, and you have to do it in fairly precise ways. It prescribes a couple of methods that you can use to establish your U.S. citizenship.

Method one, which is the simpler one: You show up with a U.S. passport that establishes your citizenship, and that one document can satisfy the entire obligation--if you have one.

A lot of Americans have them, but a lot of them don't. Not everyone travels outside the United States. If you don't travel outside the United States, you are not necessarily going to need a passport. Why go through the expense and hassle of getting one if you don't travel? That is why a lot of people don't have them. And that is one of the reasons why I find it so reckless when people are making the claim that you would have to have one, or even the indirect suggestion that anyone without a passport who is not willing to shell out a couple hundred bucks to get a passport and go through the hassle and the waiting period to get one might be disenfranchised, because that is not the only means by which you can establish your U.S. citizenship--not under the SAVE America Act, certainly, and also not under the I-9.

But under the I-9, you can also prove your citizenship by coming up with an original copy of your birth certificate--the original certified copy of your U.S. birth certificate--and then a government-issued photo ID. And in some contexts, the original Social Security card can also be acceptable along with the original certified copy of your birth certificate. And that is about it. So anybody who has ever had a job in this country who is a U.S. citizen has had to do that.

Like most Americans, I have had a number of jobs in my career, and so I have had to fill out the I-9 many times. I don't always have those documents right with me. I can usually track them down. I am pretty sure my wife knows where they are. They are not things that we utilize every day, but I know that, from time to time, I will need access to them. And I have needed access to them every time I have applied for a new job.

There have been other times when I have needed them, including when I have applied for a passport. I have needed them most recently when I renewed my driver's license in Utah. And Utah is moving toward a system of having a driver's license that can establish citizenship. The last time I renewed, they asked me to bring in those documents. I established my citizenship with that.

If you don't have those, you can't start a new job. So most Americans, if they don't have those documents at the moment they start a new job, they have to find them.

We wanted the SAVE America Act to provide other methods of documenting one's citizenship, recognizing that not everybody has those documents. A lot of people are not going to have a U.S. passport; and those who don't have a U.S. passport might also not have the combination of other documents, including the birth certificate with the State-certified seal on it--not just a photocopy--along with a government-issued photo ID and/or a Social Security card.

And so we added a bunch of other things to it. There is a subset of the REAL ID driver's license. Not all REAL ID driver's licenses prove citizenship. Some of them do. It is typically evident on the face of a REAL ID driver's license whether or not that particular driver's license establishes citizenship. That would suffice under this legislation.

It would also suffice--in some circumstances, certain forms of Tribal ID could be used, insofar as they establish citizenship.

But we wanted to go even further than that, recognizing that some people might not have any of these forms. And we didn't want to add to the expense, to the burden, to the hassle, to the delay, to the deterrent effect from voting that it might have if you had to procure or find documents that you had either lost or you never had to begin with; or your house burned down or dog ate them or your crazy Aunt Madge took them and took them to the dump and lit them on fire or whatever she did with them; or you just don't believe in documents or you don't care about them or you never had them to begin with. Whatever your reason, if you are a U.S. citizen, you need to be able to register to vote, and that ought not be that hard. So we created an alternative mechanism.

Now, mysteriously--magically--my friends across the aisle, my Democratic colleagues in the Senate, refuse defiantly to acknowledge that this provision even exists. They refuse, and they continue. They persist undaunted, undeterred by the fact that they are making false arguments--fake arguments--without a scintilla of truth to them, to the effect that this is a poll tax, to the effect that they are going to have to shell out 200 bucks to vote, to the effect that this is going to deter people, dissuade them from voting. It is going to create a chilling effect--dogs and cats living together in the streets, stuff right out of the Book of Revelation, end-of-the-world stuff.

This is nonsense. It is beneath the dignity of the U.S. Senate for them to continue this lie. Every time they make this lie, every time they engage in that fraudulent, argumentative activity, I would point out that there is a very simple provision that takes care of all of this--that reveals it, exposes it as a lie--and it can be found in the text beginning at page 12, line 22 of the legislation that we have been considering over the last 48 hours.

It makes very clear: Even if you do not have a single shred of documentation as to your citizenship--you can't find it, it burned down, whatever it is--all you have to do is swear an affidavit.

Now, the context of the affidavit--the contents of the affidavit-- might depend, might vary a little bit, depending on whether you are a natural-born or naturalized citizen. Let me explain what those terms mean, in case anyone wonders.

A natural-born citizen is a citizen who is a citizen immediately upon his or her birth by virtue of the circumstances surrounding that person's birth, typically meaning that if you are born in the United States--or if you are not born in the United States but you are born to U.S. citizen parents abroad, such that you are entitled to U.S. citizenship under U.S. law as of the moment of your birth by virtue of the circumstances surrounding your birth--you are a citizen.

So if you are a natural-born citizen, you can write out the affidavit that way: My name is such-and-such. I was born in this or that location, on or about my birthday--and whatever other facts might be relevant to that that could guide the State election officials in verifying--enabling them to confirm or refute, as the case may be, the legitimacy or the falsity of the matter as to which they are attesting in the sworn affidavit made under penalty of perjury.

At this moment, once somebody fills this out under the SAVE America Act, the burden shifts. The burden no longer belongs to the registering voter. That burden is lifted off the shoulders of the registering voter and placed onto the State.

States, you see, have access to all kinds of documents. Original documents, in many cases, and large databases of documents in other cases. The State is in a very good position to track down the details of the affidavit and easily confirm or refute what the person says.

They can go in then and say: Oh, yes, it looks like this person by this name was born on this date to the parents by these names; and, yes, they are a citizen.

Alternatively, if they are not natural-born citizens, meaning they weren't citizens automatically as of the moment of their birth by virtue of the circumstances surrounding their birth, but they later became citizens--we call those naturalized citizens. An affidavit for a naturalized citizen would be a little bit different: I was born in Yemen or Greece or Hungary or wherever it was. You probably want to name the city, the birth date, the names of your parents, their nationalities, and at some point, you would want to mention the date: I became a U.S. citizen on or about such and such a date. I took the oath of citizenship on or about such and such a date, was sworn in by this or that judge, or whoever it was who did it--the basic facts surrounding how and when and under what circumstances you became a citizen.

And, there again, the burden shifts to the State. If you are not lying, the State will quickly figure that out. And if you are lying, the State will quickly figure that out too.

Now, most people who go to the trouble of swearing out an affidavit and providing those details--again, the affidavit wouldn't take more than a few minutes to write out. You could write it out by pen or by pencil. I suppose if you can't write, you can dictate it to somebody else and you can make your mark attesting to it, making it your statement.

I suppose, because the States will have some flexibility in deciding exactly how each procedure will work within that State--maybe some States will allow them to do it through smoke signals, sky writing, sign language, whatever form of communication might be in order in the moment.

But the point is, they can make a sworn statement shifting the burden to the State. Not a single document beyond that attestation is required from that moment--not from the would-be voter. It shifts to the State. And unless you are lying, you will be registered to vote after that.

Not a single dollar, not a single dime, not a single nickel or a single penny or a fraction of a penny has to be expended by the registering voter in that moment.

And so this is just a lie, but it is a damnable lie because it is a lie that has been repeated over and over and over again in this Chamber so many times, and it has been repeated by people, some of whom have been in the Chamber when I have made this point, where I have cited chapter and verse within the legislation that we are now considering, explaining the extent to which the arguments they are making are false.

And yet, sure enough, the next Democrat that gets up to speak, speaks the same lie over and over and over again, as if by repeating the same lie often enough it somehow becomes true. That is not how the world works. It is certainly not how the world's greatest deliberative legislative body works. You don't make something that is false true by repeating it over and over and over again.

This one isn't even a matter of interpretation. There is no ambiguity on this one. There is no absolute requirement for anyone to produce any document. There are a number of documents listed which, if you produce them, will conclusively establish your citizenship. But even if you don't have them, there are other ways of doing it that won't cost you a dime, that won't require you to have even a single slip of paper with them. So there is that argument.

On the one hand, I could say I am tired of refuting it, but that is not quite it. I don't mind refuting it. I actually kind of enjoy it because the more they make this argument, the more they beclown themselves, the more they diminish their own arguments.

If they have legitimate arguments against this bill, bring them forward. I want to hear them. Those are not hollow words. I want to hear whatever legitimate arguments they have got so that we can fix them because we, as Americans, can do hard things, and if there are features of this bill that are unfair that could be changed, I want to change them.

Do you know why? Well, it is because I believe we need to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. We can achieve both.

If we focus obsessively only on the former--on making it easy to vote--we will inevitably fail in our task as to the latter point. Hyperfocusing on making it easy to vote while neglecting the all-important task of making it hard to cheat will make it so easy to vote that people who are not supposed to vote will end up voting.

This is where a number of my colleagues mischaracterized the words of the President of the United States, maligning his words, taking them out of context, and attributing to him some sinister motive. He uttered words to the effect that we have to make sure that the right people are voting. Now, he is not saying that only Republicans can vote or only people who voted for Trump can vote. It is paranoid fantasy to suggest that. In context, it is clear that what he is saying is ``the right people to vote'' mean the people who are actually eligible to vote, the people who are not prohibited from voting in U.S. elections by a U.S. law under penalty of felony prosecution. That is what he is talking about there.

And yet in their delusional desire to malign and mischaracterize not only the President of the United States but this legislation, which he supports, they are attributing to him things that he did not say.

There is another bad argument. I don't know whether this one falls into the same category as that series of lies that I just refuted. I don't know that I would call this next one a lie, but it is a really, really bad argument. It is demonstrably a failing argument.

They make the point that this somehow intrudes upon the sovereign authority of the States--although, for most of them, that is not how they are putting it. They are saying this is an infringement on States' rights. I really don't like that expression. It is a misnomer, to begin with. It harkens back to a really unfortunate era in U.S. history. It includes the Jim Crow era, another gross mischaracterization, another horrible argument that my Democratic colleagues have been making about this bill.

Why they would ever want to conjure memories of the Jim Crow era is beyond me, especially given that they were the party of Jim Crow. It was the Democratic Party that subjected so many millions of Americans, over so many decades, to a truly evil and oppressive, hateful regime that excluded them from public life, that excluded them from the benefits of American citizenship over many, many decades. That was their party.

I don't bring that up to accuse Democrat Members of this body of engaging in that. It was different generations, not alive today. None of my colleagues here were part of that legacy, part of that particular Democratic Party, but I don't know why they would want to drag their own party through the mud based on its racist past, based on its longstanding Ku Klux Klan-affiliated, Ku Klux Klan-enabled reign of terror against African Americans. And yet they do so anyway, and they do so in a way that is patently untrue and unfair, calling this Jim Crow.

There is nothing about this that is Jim Crow. There is nothing about this that is racist, that is racially charged; nothing about this that is sexist. There is not even a good argument as to a supposed disparate impact that this could have. It is just patently false.

Anyway, back to their argument about States' rights. One of many reasons I hate that expression is that it conjures images of George Wallace. It conjures images of those who distorted the Constitution to engage in all kinds of horrible things, including Jim Crow policies, over many decades.

More fundamentally, it is a misnomer. States don't have rights. States aren't people. People have rights; States have authority. Authority is used. Rights are possessed by people to render them protected from abusive State authority. So in that respect a right, which is held by a person, is kind of the polar opposite; it is the inverse. A right is to State authority what anti-matter is to matter.

If you want to call them rights, let's just call it federalism or State sovereign authority or the exclusive province of the States or whatever you want to call it.

So, now that we have that matter of nomenclature resolved, let's move on to the substance of what they are saying. They are saying, in effect, that the authority of the States over elections--over all elections--is exclusive; it is sacred; it is not to be intruded upon ever by Federal authority and that, if we do that, we are thwarting the Constitution, ignoring and trampling the 10th Amendment, the principles of federalism that even preceded the 10th Amendment, that were implicit in the text of the original Constitution and made with greater clarity when the 10th Amendment was added, along with the other Bill of Rights, initial 10 amendments, in 1791.

Their argument doesn't stand up--not at all. Do you know why? Do you know how we know that? Well, that is because of article I, section 4, clause 1. Article I, section 4, clause 1. On the one hand, it makes clear that there is an assumption, before you even read that one, that States, of course, will be in charge of conducting elections for State and local offices. Why wouldn't they be? They always would be. They always have been. They always will be. That is their exclusive domain. They can do whatever they want on those elections. They have to have a republican form of government; that is about the only restriction on State and local offices, except where the Constitution specifies elsewhere.

But with respect to Federal elections, yeah, article I, section 4 does, in fact, give the States some authority in conducting Federal elections. And, yeah, they weren't too keen on the idea of there being a single Federal election authority that would be in charge of running all Federal elections. It wouldn't have made sense at the founding, and even if it had made sense at the founding, I think they would have found that thought horrifying, just as I do and most of us do today. It is not what we are doing here. It is not what we want. It certainly wouldn't be allowed under article I, section 4. And yet they are speaking as though that is what we are doing, and that is not at all what we are doing.

Article I, section 4 says that, yeah, the States will conduct these elections for U.S. Senators and U.S. Congressmen and they will establish the rules and regulations concerning those elections that they will conduct. Then comes this line which my colleagues conveniently omit, make no reference to, and pretend does not exist in this context, just like they ignore the text beginning on line 22 of page 12 of the legislation we are now debating. Here is what that language says:

[B]ut the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter

such Regulations.

Meaning such regulations, such laws governing specifically the election of Federal officers who are elected; namely, Representatives and Senators.

We have that power. We can supplement those. We can alter those. We can prescribe our own. Why? Well, because we are the sole sovereign lawmaking organ of the Federal sovereign government, and so it makes sense that they put this authority in article I, section 4.

So this is well within our authority. This doesn't trample on, conflict with, undermine, contradict, or otherwise work against the sovereign authority of the States. And certainly nothing about the SAVE America Act undermines that. It is entirely consistent with it. In fact, I have long believed that federalism--that is, the vertical protection built into the Constitution, one of the twin structural protections--you know, the whole Constitution is about limiting government. It is about prescribing the structure and the form, affirmatively prohibiting the government from doing certain things; in some instances prohibiting the Federal Government from doing some things or the States from doing others. In some instances, it prohibits government, generally--whether State, Federal, or local--from doing certain things.

Separate and apart from that you have got these core structural protections. One operates vertically--on a vertical axis, if you will-- and we call that federalism. That is your relationship between the Federal Government on the one hand and the States on the other. The Federal Government is depicted--when we depict this graphically--is above, on top of, the States because where the Federal Government has authority, it is above the States and localities. But its authority is limited.

James Madison described this relationship in Federalist 45 when he said the powers of the Federal Government are few and defined and those reserved to the States are numerous and indefinite. You might imagine it as sort of a pyramid-shaped structure. It is broad at the base and narrow at the top. But at the top is the Federal Government. It is in charge of only a few basic

things designated as Federal by the U.S. Constitution.

The Federal Government's actions and laws passed by the Congress of the United States into law trump inconsistent State law. They control wherever, whenever the Federal Government has authority to act. That is the relationship we call federalism.

The horizontal protection operates within the Federal Government itself, saying that within the Federal Government we have three distinct branches. We have one that makes the laws. That is Congress, the legislative branch. We have another branch headed by the President. That is the executive branch, whose job it is to execute, implement, enforce the laws made by Congress. And then the third branch headed by the Supreme Court, whose job it is to interpret the laws--not just in the abstract, not to render advisory opinions--they don't have that power--not to answer esoteric, legal, or constitutional questions in the abstract--they don't have that power--but to resolve actual cases and controversies, meaning disputes, between two or more parties where they disagree as to a particular point, a particular interpretation of the law--of Federal law, to be specific--whether that be statutory or constitutional.

Anyway, back to federalism. The point is, to understand federalism appropriately, you can't assume that either the Federal Government may always dominate the States nor that the States may always dominate the Federal. Each has to operate within its own sphere. And just as it is a bad thing for the Federal Government to act where it should not, trampling the just authority of the States and their political subdivisions--the local governments--it is every bit as repugnant to the constitutional structure for the Federal Government not to act where it is empowered to act and where it is morally compelled to act.

It is no less offensive to the principles of federalism whether you are ignoring the constitutional protections in one direction or the other. They are both bad. In this circumstance, it would be bad to assume that the U.S. Congress, as my Democratic colleagues are arguing, somehow lacks the authority to tell the States that in conducting elections--not elections generally but specifically elections for Federal office, those for the U.S. Senate, U.S. House races--that the Congress of the United States can have no say in that, in how that happens. That would be lawless indeed. Not only would it be lawless; it would be inconsistent with how we have always handled these things.

There are a lot of laws on the books. There are four or five or six principal laws that tightly govern the States' conduct of elections and the relationship between the Federal Government and the States and the way they conduct elections. There are myriad others that relate to or modify or impose restrictions on the conduct by the States of Federal elections.

So it is not just that we have the authority in the abstract under the Constitution. It is also that the Congress has repeatedly exercised that authority in a number of laws, including the Federal criminal prohibition imposing a felony offense for anyone who is not a citizen of the United States who casts a vote in a Federal election. That is a felony criminal offense.

So if that is lawful--and no one here has questioned the constitutionality of that law. And given that no one has questioned the constitutionality of that law, I find it puzzling indeed that they challenge the constitutionality of a law that is designed to make sure that that law is not rendered dead letter; that it is not rendered vestigial, irrelevant, moot, unenforceable, undetectable, or otherwise nonoperative.

That is exactly what is happening here, that particular provision of law prohibiting and criminalizing noncitizen voting in U.S. elections. It is, in fact, largely vestigial and inoperative and unenforceable because it is undetectable--unless we pass the SAVE America Act or something akin to it, something that would do something similar to it.

Another law passed by Congress, also treading on and intruding into in some ways, if you want to see it that way, the State's conduct in Federal elections within their State, the 1993 NVRA--especially the way it was interpreted by the Supreme Court in 2013 in a case called Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona--made this one necessary.

In other words, the whole reason why the SAVE America Act is even in existence, the whole reason we are here having this debate, the whole reason I wrote this law a couple years ago with my House counterpart Chip Roy of Texas--he and I authored this together because we put all these pieces of the puzzle together.

A lot of people had heard about that ruling in 2013. They heard about NVRA. They were aware of some of the other developments that have made this boil up, you know, kind of past the boiling point in recent years. We put them all together and realized: Oh my goodness, our Federal elections are in trouble unless we close this loophole that has come into existence over the years because of the Supreme Court's interpretation of the NVRA and a number of other factors and immigration patterns and the way the States are responding to some of those changes.

So isn't that ironic. Not one of them has argued that the NVRA is unconstitutional--not one of them.

Not one of them has argued that the Federal criminal ban on noncitizen voting in Federal elections is unconstitutional, constitutionally problematic, inconsistent with the principles of federalism--not one of them.

Not one of them has argued that the Help America Vote Act of 2005-- no, that wasn't 2005. That was earlier. Not one of them has argued that that is unconstitutional.

I don't think I have heard them refer to the Voting Rights Act as unconstitutional or any other Federal statute governing the conduct of Federal elections.

Not one of them has been characterized as unconstitutional. Why is that? And why do they characterize this as unconstitutional or as problematic under principles of federalism? That is curious, isn't it? Makes you wonder. Maybe this isn't really about federalism, just as it is not really about Jim Crow, just as it is not really about misogyny, just as it is not really about Jim Crow 2.0 racism or people who live in rural communities or people who have a strange aversion to carrying documents around with them--whatever it is. No, it is not about any of those things.

They will have to tell us what the real reason is, but it makes you wonder: Who benefits? Who benefits from a system that makes it really, really easy to vote and really, really easy to cheat? Who benefits from a system that freely allows noncitizens to walk into just about any DMV in just about any State in America and, with a couple of strokes of a pen while applying for a driver's license, say: Yeah. By the way, I want to register to vote too.

All you have to do while applying for a driver's license is check a box saying ``I want to register to vote'' and sign your name at the bottom saying, ``Yeah, it is OK for me to vote. I am a citizen and otherwise able to vote.''

Who benefits from that? Could that be the real reason? There has got to be a real reason, or maybe it is a category of real reasons because it sure as hell isn't about federalism, and it sure as hell isn't about racism or misogyny or Jim Crow or any of these bullcrap arguments. I hate to say that word in this Chamber, but it is true. These are contrivances. They are pretextual arguments, and they are damned lies, every last one of them. This is appropriate for Federal authority. It just is. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

The real stunning thing about this is that the same people in this very Chamber who have the audacity to argue that this is somehow incompatible with federalism, these are the same people who between 2021 and 2023 supported a bill in that Congress commonly known as H.R. 1.

Do you want to know what H.R. 1 did? H.R. 1 did exactly what they are now falsely accusing us of doing in this bill, in the SAVE America Act. It was a wholesale Federal takeover that, as I recall, every last Democrat in this Chamber who was serving at the time who is still here today supported.

It would have, among other things, subjected every voting jurisdiction in the United States to preclearance, meaning that every time they made any change to their election laws, any change to their precincts, legislative

districts, any of those things, they would have to go to Washington, DC, bow before some bureaucratic pinhead Democratic political appointee at the Department of Justice, kiss the ring, and wait to receive preclearance, approval for a State law or a local law making any changes to their election laws.

And that was just the beginning. That thing went on and on and on so much so that it would have flipped on its head what James Madison described about federalism in Federalist 45. Remember when he said that the powers of the Federal Government are few and defined and that those reserved to the States are numerous and indefinite? This would have turned that completely upside down in the field of elections and said that the powers of the Federal Government are numerous and indefinite and that those reserved to the States are few and defined--and, by the way, exercised only at will, only at the sufferance of the benevolent Federal sovereign.

This is wrong. They should be ashamed of themselves for making this argument. And it is cover for something else. It is cover for the fact that they don't have a legitimate argument, so they have to make up stuff that isn't true, and I am sick of it--now, not sick of it in the sense that I am going to stop for even a second calling them out on it. I am just getting started. I am having fun--fun in the sense that I am peeling back the layers of the onion, revealing their arguments to be disingenuous, false, and utterly indefensible.

If they have real arguments, bring them forward. I would love to hear them. I would love nothing more than to hear one real argument about this bill that isn't built on a lie, isn't built on a distortion of this legislation, on a distortion of American history, on a distortion of the motives of the Members of this body whom they constantly defame. I would love it. Do you know why? Because at that point, we would come back and we would make changes to the law. We would make changes because all we want to do is make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. And if they can point out an actual, real problem with it, we could fix it. Yet we haven't heard any of that, not from that side of the aisle.

The first legitimate set of arguments or potentially legitimate set of arguments that gives us something to work with--somebody who has some concerns with it--have come from a Republican Senator, my friend and colleague from Alaska, Senator Murkowski.

Now, I disagree with her ultimate take on the bill, her opposition to it, but I understand now what some of her arguments are, and I am confident we can work through this. I am confident, first of all, that we can work through her concerns even under the existing text, and I hope--I hope--that we can bring her along, that she can get to a point where she is comfortable voting for this legislation as is. But even if we can't, I am also confident that, if necessary, we can make changes to that that will get her comfortable with this bill text.

Some of her concerns relate not to the bill text, not to the bill we are now considering, but to a substitute amendment or perhaps other amendments that may have been filed but that we have yet to consider, that have yet to be called up, that may or may not be considered, may or may not be adopted once they are called up, if they are called up. We will deal with those in time, but don't attribute those to the bill we are now debating because they are not in there.

The concerns she raised with the actual legislation, with the actual House-passed legislative vehicle that came over here 48 hours ago in the form of a message that we voted to proceed to--she identified some actual concerns there that we can work with. Again, I think we can get her comfortable with it. I think there are things that the State of Alaska could do even under the existing legislative text that could make Senator Murkowski comfortable.

But even if we can't get there, I am willing to consider and explore, as needed, even some changes if that is what it takes to bring her along. Why? Because she has raised actual arguments that are rooted in fact rather than paranoid fantasy, rooted in reality rather than lies, rooted in genuine concern for the well-being of her constituents rather than cheap political points. And she is not lying, and I appreciate that about her.

We have yet to hear any of those arguments from the other side. We have yet to hear any reasonable suggestion as to the other side and how the other side views that we could do this, we just have to go about it a different way.

Now, starting yesterday, we started hearing something new from some of our Democratic colleagues, something that I found mildly encouraging and still find somewhat encouraging. Some of them have started to say: You know what, maybe voter ID laws aren't such a bad thing. Maybe we could live with those.

It is a good thing because voter ID laws are overwhelmingly popular. I don't care if you are a Republican or a Democrat; if you live in the North, the South, the East, the West, the Midwest, the dead center of the country, wherever; whether you are a Democrat or a Republican; you are Black or White or some other race; you are male or female; you are liberal or you are conservative--it doesn't matter. If you meet any of those characteristics, regardless of what your background is, overwhelmingly--like by the odds of anywhere from 7 to 3 to 9 to 1--you are going to be in support of voter ID laws.

So they have started to acknowledge: Yeah, maybe we could do that part.

Well, great. We still need the citizenship stuff, but if they are OK with voter ID laws, let's get that done.

Now, in response to that, my friend and colleague from the State of Ohio Senator Husted came to the floor just an hour or two ago and offered what I thought was a very reasonable accommodation--an accommodation in the form of a good-faith gesture; an olive branch, if you will--to the Democrats saying: Hey, you all have started to say you could live with voter ID laws. Let's take the voter ID language out of this bill, offer it up as a freestanding piece of legislation--not always a fan of doing that in every case. Sometimes you need everything to pass in one piece. For various reasons, it needs to happen together. This isn't one of those. We can pass that alone. I would do it right now. Shoot, if my colleagues will agree to it, we could pass it right now.

That is what Jon Husted tried to do just a couple of hours ago.

Jon Husted is a smart guy. Jon Husted knows more about elections and how to run them than probably not just any Member of the Senate here today but probably any Senator who has ever served in our 239-year history as an institution.

He came and he said: Let's try to pass this.

We had a chance an hour or two ago to do that. Well, that drew an objection from the Democrats. Why? They have all been saying: Hey, we are OK with voter ID laws; it is that citizenship stuff we don't want to deal with.

The question of ``why'' is another matter. We will get back to that in a minute.

So we said: Let's do it. Let's go. Let's freaking go. Let's get this thing passed right now, and then we can move on to the other stuff.

I am not going to give up on the other stuff because we need that too. I am open to negotiation if people have ways of making it better. But let's get this done right now.

He offered it up, and it drew an objection from the Democrats. What did they say about it? They made arguments about a completely different set of provisions that had nothing to do with voter ID. It was the strangest thing I have ever seen. I don't know what was going on there, but anybody who saw that objection, if you paid careful attention, it had not a darn thing to do with what he was offering. They were objecting to completely different provisions that he wasn't offering at the time.

So we are going to have to do that again sometime soon, hopefully in the next 24 hours or less. Let's try to do that again. Maybe this time, they will realize what we are actually approaching. Let's get that done, and then we can move on and deal with the rest of the provisions dealing with citizenship.

If they have qualms about any particular provision, again, I am all ears. Not only am I willing to hear it, I am

eager to hear it. I want to hear what the actual reason is insofar as there are real reasons other than: We like the status quo. We want people to have the option of voting as noncitizens if they are noncitizens, if they want to break the law and risk getting caught, because we know they won't get caught because it is impossible to get caught under this regime.

The 1993 NVRA passed by this body, as interpreted wrongly but conclusively by the Supreme Court of the United States in 2013, as affected by immigration trends resulting in 30 million-plus noncitizens residing in this country today--10 to 15 million of whom came into this country unlawfully between 2021 and 2025 alone--have all brought us to that point.

There is another feature that makes it really, really dark, really, really scary, and it is this.

In some States, States have started allowing noncitizens to vote. It starts out small, as it has with those States, a handful of four or five States. And in some cases some of those States, often blue States, not red, are saying: It is OK. Some of our local elections, you don't need to be a citizen to vote.

There is, of course, nothing in the U.S. Constitution that says they can't do that. There is nothing in Federal law that I am aware of that says they can't do that, as long as it is with something other than a Federal election.

I think it is crazy. I think it is absolutely nuts. I don't know why you would ever let a noncitizen vote in any election inside the United States, but if they want to do it and their State constitution or their State law allows it, States are allowed to do dumb things. This is a dumb thing, but they are allowed to do that.

But here is the scary part. The scary part is that those same jurisdictions just quietly refuse, along with most nearly all blue States--that is, States run by Democrat Governors and/or Democrat-run legislatures--they refuse to share information. They refuse to cooperate with Federal authorities, the same Federal authorities who have been directed under existing law to maintain databases like the SAVE database that is designed to keep track of who is a citizen and who is not and voter registrations and things like that.

These jurisdictions, these blue State jurisdictions, including and especially those that allow noncitizens to vote in their local elections, are defiantly refusing to share their information, pursuant to a memorandum of understanding or otherwise, with Federal authorities whose job it is to keep track of these things.

That is kind of scary if you think about it because there are reasonable questions that ought to be asked that aren't being asked and must be asked about the fact that if you are registering noncitizens to vote in those local elections where noncitizens in those jurisdictions are allowed to vote, however misguidedly, it must mean that they are registered. Once they are registered, how exactly is it that you separate out those who are registered to vote as noncitizens in local elections, and how do you prevent those same registered voters from then gaining access to a ballot in a Federal election?

They have gone mum. They have become mute. They refuse to cooperate. They have stonewalled. They have shut out the Federal authorities. They won't tell them their methodology. They won't tell them what they do. They won't show them their voter rolls. That is kind of scary. That shows a level of awareness of their known risk that perhaps just maybe to some of these people is not a risk. To some of them maybe it is not a bug; it is a feature.

What if it is part of their strategy for winning elections? Might that explain why almost no blue State is willing to give them the time of day? Now, sure, they can wrap themselves in the flag--I don't know which flag it is, it is not the American flag, in some sort of flag-- and say: We don't want to share information because privacy, because America, because data security.

What does that even mean? I mean, first of all, you have got this brooding omnipresence of a government, which I will be the first to admit has way too much information about all of us all the time. It is spooky. These guys can track down stuff your mother did in second grade. They have got information already on every economic transaction that you have ever engaged in, tax data, the banking transaction information, too, all the information that the Federal Government collects from any Agency. If you travel, they know where and when you have entered and exited the United States, all kinds of data. And this is before we get into what happens under FISA section 702 with the so- called incidental collection where you happen to be talking to somebody who, unbeknownst to you, is an agent of a foreign power, and all of a sudden what you thought were private communications are being swept up and loaded onto Federal databases that can be searched by your name, knowing that you are a U.S. citizen, knowing that a particular phone number is yours.

So, yeah, the Federal Government has got a lot of data. It is spooky. I don't like it. But why all of a sudden are they wrapping themselves in the flag and saying: Yeah, we don't want the Federal Government having any ability to review data on our voter files. Why? Why are they all of a sudden concerned about that? Have we ever had a lapse in the SAVE database of something that resulted in the release of personally identifiable information? Not to my knowledge. If there were, we would find it. And if there were, it would pale in comparison to other data breaches we have had through all kinds of Federal Agencies.

And we are talking about voter registration files that they are wanting to examine and have access to for one purpose and one purpose alone. It is not to track down voters and ask them relentlessly whom they are going to vote for. It is not even for a nefarious purpose, even one that can be speculated on that is the supposed motivation for this thing.

I don't even know what it is they are freaking out on, but more to the point is the very legitimate reason why they need this information. Why? Because we have Federal laws and those Federal laws prohibit noncitizens from voting in U.S. elections. And we have a system in place that prohibits any noncitizens--any of the 30 million or so, at least the subset of 30 million or so noncitizens residing in this country--it prohibits them from voting. That is all they are trying to get to is to make sure the people that are not allowed to vote are not, in fact, registering to vote or voting.

Why are they so freaked out about that? Now, don't get me wrong. I love the impulse to protect privacy. That is not what this is about or they would say so.

If it were the case, there would be something about this particular regime, about the SAVE database that would give us some indication that this is a genuine privacy risk. It is not. And I haven't even heard any of them try to make the case that it is because it is not.

They like the status quo for some reason. Can't get into their heads, but I do have to wonder, Who benefits from the status quo? Who benefits if noncitizens are voting in U.S. elections? Is that what they are really afraid of--losing an edge?

Now, sometimes the mask slips a little bit, and I wonder if some have maybe admitted to more than they intended to. I have heard a number of my Democratic colleagues over the last 48 hours say things like the following--not just the last 48 hours but in the last few weeks as people have been speaking publicly and in here about their concerns about the legislation.

Some of them have uttered words to the effect that: This might exclude more people who tend to vote as Democrats.

Could that be the reason? They are worried about noncitizens overwhelmingly voting as Democrats, that they will lose votes that way? Surely, that is not the reason they are concerned about that, is it? Let's hope not.

I mean, I would hope that neither party and no Member of this body would want their party to win elections that way by having noncitizens vote.

And yet if that is not their reason, they are throwing up an awful lot of dust and dirt and smoke. A bunch of arguments that are just bad in some instances, illogical in others, and more often than not, false and demonstrably false. Could that be why? That is kind of scary.

It is one of the reasons why I am growing increasingly suspicious. Usually in this body we have a lot of disagreements. And I have got good friends at every point across the political spectrum in this body, within my own party, across on the other side, some of the people--I really like most personally, some of the people I work with a lot legislatively and agree with them on a lot of things and some are people that I don't agree with on a lot of issues and a number of them are across the aisle and Members of the other party.

And most of the time, even when we are debating on issues where I know there is genuinely deep-seated, honest disagreement on matters of policy, even if I don't agree with them and even if they cut more or less along party lines, I can nearly always at least understand their argument, and I can see what the countervailing point is. I can usually articulate it, even if I don't share their ultimate conclusion, what their concerns are.

I can't do that here because I have yet to hear a single compelling or even credible argument from the other side on this.

The only person I have heard today or in the last 48 hours speak on this floor who is currently opposed to this bill came from the senior Senator from Alaska who raised some observations that, while I don't share her conclusion, I understand where she is going, and I am earnestly desirous to engage in further conversation with her to see if we can close that gap.

I think there are ways that this could be implemented, even with the current text, that could satisfy her concerns, which are legitimate. And if we can't do that with the current text to her satisfaction, I would love to be able to, and I think we could accommodate her concerns through some modest legislative changes to the existing text. We will see where that goes, and I am optimistic about that.

But with the exception of the arguments she has raised, I have yet to hear any credible argument about this bill. What I have heard are arguments made over and over and over again that bear no resemblance to existing Federal law, that are indefensible when compared to the actual legislative text that we are considering, to the legislative and historical backdrop against which we are evaluating that legislative text, and so that does make me wonder why.

You know, years ago, maybe 20 years ago or so, as on many occasions, I was planning on watching a Supreme Court argument, and as I sometimes do, I read the briefs before the argument. I was not a litigant in the case, but I was interested in the case. I read the briefs, and I came to a pretty firm conclusion, as sometimes happens, as to who was more likely to win the case at the end of the day.

When I attended the oral argument the next day, the oral argument didn't go quite as I expected. I had a pretty--I was quite convinced before the argument that, based on the briefs, I believe it was the petitioner--the petitioner is the party who is trying to get the lower court ruling reversed before the Supreme Court--I believe it was the petitioner who I decided was almost certainly going to lose.

The lawyer representing the petitioner--who was one of the more venerated members of the Supreme Court bar, a seasoned practitioner who had argued many, many times before the High Court, one of the best lawyers in America, certainly in the realm of appellate and Supreme Court litigation--his argument surprised me, as did the outcome of the case.

The reason the argument surprised me is that unlike every other argument I had ever seen or heard about that lawyer arguing, this one strayed pretty far from the arguments raised in the brief. Usually, you can't get away with this. I was surprised when he did get away with it, but he got up there. I don't know how else to describe it other than to say that it reminded me of a sort of ``who is on first, what is on second'' routine.

He threw out arguments that, to me at least, appeared to be designed only to confuse the members of the Court, which is hard to do because now, as was the case then, these are not just nine people wearing robes, but they are nine of the smartest legal minds in the entire country. They are bright. They are not easily distracted.

But this lawyer was so good, he got up there, and with 30 minutes of ``who is on first, what is on second,'' got them so confused that somehow he managed to win the case. I wonder if that is what is going on here.

There is that old saying: If the law is against you, pound the facts; if the facts are against you, you pound the law; when they are both against you, pound the table.

The other side is pounding the table. They are pounding the table because they have got nothing. At least they have got nothing in terms of an argument they can make credibly and with a straight face.

So instead what do they do? They pound the table while making arguments that are utterly indefensible. I ask the question, Why? Who does that?

Now, these are not untalented statesmen. They are not novice lawmakers. My Democrat colleagues are some of the most seasoned rhetoricians and legal minds and legislators that this country has ever known, both in cases where I have agreed with them and where I have disagreed with them, sometimes sticking with where most Members of my party agree and sometimes departing from them to join with them. I have seen them make arguments, and they are darn good at it when they have them.

This one is different. They are not making good arguments, and that tells me one thing: They don't have them. So they grab for whatever is there, hoping to kick up enough dust to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt to a degree sufficient to take away from what is otherwise an 85- 15 issue of Americans who overwhelmingly support this legislation and the policies underlying it. Well, I can't prove it in the sense that I can't peer into the mind of any other individual, let alone 47 of them, but at the same time, I don't have any other rational explanation for it.

These are smart people. When they have good arguments, they raise them. They are not making them here. They are lying. They are distorting. They are overlooking. They are ignoring reasons that are plain--in black and white. They ignore them even after they hear them from my own mouth while they have been in the same room. They ignore them. What does that tell you? They are pounding the table. They are kicking up dust because they have not got anything else. That should tell us something.

It is an honor to live in this country. It is an honor to be a U.S. citizen. This is often referred to--and I fundamentally believe that it is--as the greatest civilization that human history has ever recorded. We are honored and privileged to live in a day and age with so many blessings and so many benefits, and those blessings and benefits wouldn't exist but for the fact that we are a nation of laws.

We are far from perfect. We honor our commitments, our Constitution, our Declaration of Independence, and our system of laws imperfectly, but we aspire toward that which is good. We aspire toward law and order, and generally speaking, that runs the spectrum whether you are a Democrat or a Republican or something in between. But we can lose that. It is not guaranteed to us. You can't pass it in the bloodstream. Unless we fight for and defend the principles of the American Revolution with every generation--and those of us with the responsibility to safeguard the Constitution, unless we look out for it--we can lose it.

The expression is: If everyone is family, no one is.

If everyone is a citizen, no one is.

If everyone has the benefits of citizenship even in the absence of actual citizenship, you are going to have problems. In previous eras, maybe this wasn't as much of a problem--before we had 30-million-plus noncitizens in the United States, 10 to 15 million of whom came in illegally in a 4-year period alone.

Especially now, when as many people are here under these circumstances--when we couldn't have made it easier if we had tried for people to register to vote and, in fact, vote as noncitizens even though Federal law prohibits it--we have made it impossible to detect it. When you make it impossible to detect it, you make it even more impossible to prove it, to prosecute it, and to convict upon it.

Shame on us, if in knowing what is happening, we do nothing.

The American people know better. The American people expect more. They understand that bad things happen when we settle. So, no. Don't settle for lawlessness. Expect the rule of law.

Don't settle for just letting anyone vote in Federal elections. Expect that U.S. citizenship means something and that we will fight for your right to exercise that privilege and that prerogative of the vote without allowing others to steal and dilute it.

Don't settle for open borders. Expect enforcement.

Don't settle for a system that openly encourages, allows, tolerates, and facilitates those bent on foreign election interference in America. Expect lawmakers who will defend the sovereign prerogatives of the United States of America.

I personally believe that Almighty God has protected this land, blessing us with these great security barriers in the form of a vast ocean to our east and another vast ocean to our west and friendly countries to our north and south. We have been richly blessed not just with those things but with navigable waterways, easily travelable interstate highways, interstate airways--something our Founding Fathers couldn't have dreamed of.

We have been blessed by all of these things--the interconnectedness that comes from the opportunity that is given, rather uniquely, to Americans. It is a place that is somewhat unique. Almost anywhere in the world, you can live really well if you are wealthy, but America is somewhat unique in that, if you are born here or even if you are born somewhere else and you come in here penniless, naked, afraid, hungry, thirsty, you have the reasonable hope and expectation that, if you are reasonably capable, if you work hard and you play by the rules, one day, you can retire comfortably or, in some cases, wealthy.

That is something special, and that ``something'' depends upon the rule of law, and it depends upon our willingness to look out for those who are citizens of the United States. We don't do this out of malice for those who are not citizens. We do this out of love for those who are.

You see, it matters when you are a citizen. It matters that much that we are willing to undertake this fight. I am willing to continue this fight as long as it takes. I will keep coming back to the Senate floor day after day, week after week, month after month if it takes that long--and, yes, I intend to do that. We will stay on this bill as long as it takes to get it passed. I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep. I will stop at nothing until this is done.

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

Mr. President, here we find ourselves today, a little over 24 hours after we began consideration of the SAVE America Act, having passed the motion to proceed to that measure yesterday afternoon.

It is important to me. I think it is important to the American people, who overwhelmingly support this measure and the policy changes it would bring about when enacted into law, that we keep our running tally of the arguments being raised against it. The arguments for and against it are and properly should be monitored by the American people so that they can see what is going on.

This does, after all, impact them, and it impacts them in a way that goes beyond the run-of-the-mill piece of legislation.

Everything we do potentially affects the American people one way or another, some things more than others. A simple sense of the Senate resolution declaring ``National Sofa Care Week'' might impact them less than something like raising taxes, for example.

This one is, in some ways, upstream from all of those because the SAVE America Act deals with something very fundamental. It deals with the way that the citizens are able to interact with and influence their own government. Really, it is the fundamental premise of the founding of our Nation and the creation of our Republic.

In many respects, the Declaration of Independence, whose birthday we are about to celebrate this year--we are nearly 250 years since we became our own country, since we declared independence. In the Declaration of Independence, in addition to kicking off the creation of the greatest civilization that human history has ever recorded, it also set out a vision for the type of Nation we aspire to become and, in fact, have become. It established a few basic principles. In many respects, the Declaration of Independence, while not quoted as often, while not celebrated as much, and while it is maybe a step or two detached from the day-to-day operation of the government--in some respects, the Declaration of Independence is itself the picture that we look at when we assess who we are as a country. The Constitution is the frame--the structure that holds it in place, that sets the boundaries-- but the Declaration provides the picture.

The Declaration acknowledges the existence of popular sovereignty. It acknowledges the natural fundamental rights that God and nature's God lay before us; that acknowledges the fundamental truths about who we are and what government is in relation to us; that we have these self- evident truths, these God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; the understanding that government exists for the well-being of human beings and not the other way around; and that whenever government becomes destructive of those same ends--life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for example--it is the right, it is the duty, it is the obligation to alter or abolish that government and to establish something that will secure their freedoms.

Some 11 years after that document was penned, after several years, we won the war against what was then the world's last-standing great superpower in a conflict that could be analogized to David and Goliath. We were not Goliath. We were David--we were the underdog of underdogs-- and, somehow, we managed to win that war. We established a form of government, after winning that war, under the Articles of Confederation.

Instinctively, intuitively, we adopted a form of national government that was weak, that was meek, that was mild--in part because we had just come off of an experience with our mother country where we saw that the risk of tyranny was greater at the national level than it was at the local level. Meanwhile, during our Colonial period prior to the Revolution, we had had a taste of local self-rule in a way that was somewhat different than local government had been prior to that time back in the mother country. Given how far we were removed geographically, physically, in miles from the mother country, that by itself offered a degree of independence from our London-based government, and we became accustomed to it.

The amount of muscle flexed by the mother country would wax and wane over time depending on what was happening back in London, throughout the British Isles, and throughout the British Empire during periods where there were a lot of debts to pay off often from wars waged on multiple continents. There were times when our British overseers became more aggressive in the way they regulated us, in the way especially that they collected taxes from us, and they became more of a brooding omnipresence during those seasons. It was during one of those seasons in which the American people had decided that they had had enough and that it was time to break our ties with the mother country and become our own country.

So years passed. We won the war against all odds, against all expectations. We set up the Articles of Confederation instinctively, reflexively, creating a fairly weak form of national government, but it was so weak that it couldn't perform the basic functions that we needed a national government to perform, and it was that set of circumstances that led the individuals who would write the Constitution to try to come together.

They tried to come together in 1786 in Annapolis. They couldn't form a quorum, so they abandoned that project. They reconvened the following year in the late spring of 1787. By the time they formed a quorum in 1787, the heat of the season was upon them. It was unseasonably hot, and it was muggy as Philadelphia often is during that time of year. They labored through a process that was intense, that was itself a system that you might describe almost as flying a plane while building a plane. They came together initially, ostensibly, to amend the Articles of Confederation to correct some of these inadequacies--the inability of the national government to forestall the economic balkanization that had started to take place among the former Colonies--now States--and to deal with some of the defects of the Articles of Confederation.

What came out from all of that was, of course, a completely new document; and it was a document that, I believe, was written by the hands of wise men raised up by Almighty God under that very purpose, but it preserved these basic tenets--the basic tenets of popular sovereignty, of natural rights that had been articulated so well in the Declaration of Independence--and it gave them substance; it gave them form. It put in place a structure that would be there to guarantee their endurance and to make them a reality.

How is this relevant to the SAVE America Act? Well, it has everything to do with the SAVE America Act.

In that Constitution--predicated on the Declaration of Independence-- we made clear that the people are, in fact, the sovereigns; that this is their government. It set up these three coordinate branches of government. One branch of government--the branch of government in which we operate--makes the laws. They understood this government from the outset to be the most powerful and the most dangerous because the other two operated, would operate, or were designed to operate in some ways ancillary to this one. They certainly understood that this was the most dangerous branch, and we know that because it is the branch of government most routinely subject to regular elections. Every Member of the House of Representatives is subject to reelection every 2 years, and a third of the Members of this body are, likewise, up for reelection every 2 years.

So it is no accident--it is not a mere coincidence--that the Founding Fathers subjected us to the most regular elections because we are the most dangerous branch. We make the laws. The executive branch implements and executes and carries out those laws. The judicial branch resolves disputes over the meaning of the laws that we put in place where two or more parties can't agree as to what a particular provision of Federal law--whether it is statutory or constitutional-- might mean.

For all of this to work, popular sovereignty has to be maintained, and that means a close, tight connection to the American people themselves. These elections matter. It is one of the reasons why, in article I of the Constitution--the part of the Constitution that sets up the legislative branch--it gives the Congress the power to establish rules with some significant limitations but rules nonetheless that would apply nationwide with respect to the election of Federal officials--of Members of the House of Representatives and Members of the Senate. Those rules would need to have nationwide application because they involved, distinctively, national lawmaking powers. That is why we have the power to operate here to begin with.

If at any point the Federal Government generally or in particular at this particular branch of government becomes untethered from the will of the people--from the elections and the decisions made in those elections concerning those who serve in the Congress of the United States, whether in the House or in the Senate--we have a problem. To the extent that our elections for these Federal offices lose their legitimacy--actual or perceived or a combination of the two--we end up with problems because the government itself starts to lose its legitimacy. And it is not just that, well, it is one of the three branches that is in question in this part of the conversation. It is that this is the wellspring of everything else that happens within the U.S. Government. What happens in the executive branch and what happens in the judicial branch are in many respects downstream from what happens in this body, in this building, whose job it is to make laws.

So that is where the SAVE America Act comes into play, but it comes into play after decades of Congress previously adopting laws, enacting laws, putting laws in place that somewhat altered the landscape for how elections or, at least, Federal elections are carried out.

One of those pivotal moments that we have to keep in mind as we discuss the SAVE America Act is a law that was passed in 1993--a law that really without which we wouldn't be here today having this discussion. The law passed in 1993 to which I am referring to is the National Voter Registration Act--the NVRA, also known as the motor voter law.

What it does is it allows people in the United States and in any State that participates in the NVRA process--nearly all the States do, with only a very small handful of holdouts. An overwhelming, super, supermajority of the American population lives in those States that participates in it. It allows people in those participating States, when they apply for a driver's license--it is something that was unheard of, something that wouldn't have existed because none of the technology existed for it at the time of the American founding but that, today, is more or less ubiquitous among the adult, voting age American population--a driver's license. So the NVRA allows people, when applying for a driver's license in an NVRA-participating State, to show up at a DMV, and as they are filling out their driver's license application, they may simultaneously register to vote.

The reason Congress had authority to do that was because of our authority under article I of the Constitution to set up rules governing these Federal elections to which I refer. It was a fairly simple concept, and it has been successful in many ways in helping a lot of people register to vote. There is some natural appeal to it in that a lot of the same information that a person has to supply in order to apply for a driver's license is information similar to what one supplies when registering to vote. So there seems to be a nice symmetry for it, and it has resulted in a whole lot of people registering to vote.

A few things have changed in our laws and in our society since that law was adopted some 33 years ago. One of the things that has changed is that we do have a lot more noncitizens residing in this country right now than we did then or perhaps at any time in American history. Some 30 million-plus noncitizens reside in the United States.

Between 2021 and 2025 alone, some 10 to 15 million people entered our country unlawfully during the Biden administration. That was a very significant development--a development that came about as another trend was also developing--a trend in which, in nearly every State, you can now apply for and receive a driver's license even if you are not a citizen of the United States. In 19 of those States, plus the District of Columbia, you may apply for and receive a driver's license even if you are a known illegal immigrant--someone who is in this country unlawfully. In 19 States, plus the District of Columbia, you can apply for and receive a driver's license.

Something else happened in the intervening time period. Twenty years after the NVRA was passed by Congress, the Supreme Court of the United States--the highest Court of the land that sits just across the street from us--decided a case, a case called Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona.

And in that case, the Supreme Court did something that I still find puzzling, that I still find wrong--something that made the SAVE America Act very, very necessary. So I want to talk about that case for a minute and how that relates to this law, and why the reference to that law is so important in refuting some of the arguments that are made against this bill, because one of the arguments that you hear is we don't need the SAVE America Act. We don't need it because Federal law already prohibits noncitizens from voting, and so it doesn't happen. Or if it does happen, it is exceedingly rare, so much so that it almost never happens--more than likely to get struck by lightning twice while standing in the same place than

you are to see noncitizens voting, so the argument goes.

And the argument goes: Therefore, this legislation is not necessary. Go on with your lives, citizens. Don't worry about this. ``These aren't the droids you're looking for.'' Whatever argument you want to make from it, that is kind of what they say.

It doesn't wash. In fact, we can reach exactly the opposite conclusion of that.

Let's get back to this decision made by the Supreme Court in 2013, Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona. In that case, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that States are prohibited from requiring proof of citizenship from those registering to vote in Federal elections using an NVRA supplied form, which is the form available at DMV locations across all of America, at least in those participating States, which are nearly all of the States.

Now, this holding is problematic, especially considering, in many places, you are dealing with States that, even if they have reason to believe they might be registering people who are not citizens of this country, they still can't ask for documentary proof or any evidence of citizenship because the Supreme Court concluded that this was preempted out, that it was taken off the table, made something beyond the authority of the States under this law.

It becomes doubly problematic in light of the fact that it is a relatively recent trend or at least a trend that most people haven't been familiar with until fairly recently. There are some places throughout the country in which noncitizens are fully permitted to vote in certain non-Federal elections, more typically in the context of local elections in certain States, including California, Maryland, Vermont, and the District of Columbia.

And so while explicitly permitting noncitizen voting in that context--while doing that--you are registering people to vote in those elections who are not eligible to vote in Federal elections. So that raises the question: What steps, if any, are they taking to separate out those ballots, those voter registrations for people who are known noncitizens of the United States, making them eligible to vote in some of these local elections in those jurisdictions like California, Maryland, DC, and in Vermont? What are they doing to make sure that those same voters in those voter registrations are not able to vote in Federal elections?

So why not have those jurisdictions certify that those voting in State-run Federal elections are, in fact, U.S. citizens and that they have excluded all noncitizen voters registered in those jurisdictions from voting in any Federal election? Why not enter into cooperative agreements, for example, with the Federal Government, allowing the relevant Federal Agencies to verify citizenship of anyone registered to vote, at least for purposes of voting in a Federal election?

But the Democrat-run governments in those jurisdictions refuse to do this. In fact, more than half the States have currently entered into memoranda of understanding with the Federal Government, with Federal Agencies allowing for this cooperation to take place. But these Democratic States refuse to enter into any such MOUs.

So while Democrats argue Federal law prohibits noncitizen voting and insist that noncitizen voting is not just rare but exceedingly rare, so rare that we shouldn't even consider it cognizable in this Chamber, it remains unknown--and, in many instances, unknowable--how many illegal votes are being counted in Federal elections or how many illegal votes cast by noncitizens might be cast in any future Federal election, including the midterm congressional elections taking place this November.

There is currently no mechanism to verify the citizenship status of those registered to vote, and that is what this legislation was designed to provide--to fill this gap left quite inadvisably and unnecessarily by the Supreme Court of the United States in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona.

Now, look, that interpretation of the NVRA was wrong. This Congress did not preempt out State authority to verify citizenship in the NVRA. It didn't speak to that; nor did it so preempt the field that one could look at it and reasonably conclude that that is what it did. The Supreme Court was wrong. Nonetheless, a majority of the Supreme Court did reach that conclusion, and it remains the conclusive authority on that.

My former boss Justice Alito wrote a beautiful, masterful dissent, like so many others that he has issued. Nonetheless, this remains the holding of the Court, and it remains the law of the land to this very day, and that is why we are here.

So Federal law prohibits noncitizen voting, yes, but a prohibition without a reliable verification process is an incomplete safeguard. In fact, it almost is at risk of becoming dead-letter law in much the same way it would be if--I don't know--other laws, for example, prohibiting the sale of alcohol to underage purchasers, if that too ran on the honor system, because, ultimately, that is how this NVRA form works. After this Supreme Court decision in 2013, all a person need do is go into a DMV, say, ``I want to apply for a driver's license,'' fill out the form, and here is what their proof of citizenship looks like. It consists of checking a box saying: Yes, I would like to register to vote, and then signing their name, certifying that, yes, I am eligible to vote. Nothing to see here, no worries. ``These aren't the droids you're looking for.'' Go on with your lives.

That doesn't work, and it wouldn't work the same way if we borrow, by analogy, my point about underage drinking--if all you had to do is go into--I don't know--a 7-Eleven or a liquor store or wherever people buy alcohol these days and say: I am old enough to buy alcohol.

The kid is maybe 12, doesn't have to shave, never even looked at a razor, and has got a high-pitched voice that hasn't even started to crack yet. All he has to do is check a box and sign his name. He is home free.

It would then be almost impossible to detect, almost impossible to punish, in law. So you can have a law on the books, but if you leave no mechanism for the detection of violations or for any type of enforcement when a violation occurs, the law becomes more or less dead letter.

That would be bad in any society that decides it is a bad idea to sell alcohol to children. It is not really heading in a good place. It doesn't lead to good policy outcomes. That would be bad.

But I think it has got to be infinitely worse when that law deals not with just a general issue of public policy, as underage drinking does, but is at the very headwaters of all other Federal law because this determines the citizens' relationship with their national government.

If they are no longer in charge of it but somebody else is going to be, you are allowing, in effect, and inviting foreign election interference in U.S. elections. That is a big problem. We have spent a lot of time, expended a lot effort in this body, talking about the risk of foreign election interference in U.S. elections. I can think of no greater risk of foreign election interference than that which is occasioned by the NVRA and the Supreme Court's interpretation of it and the circumstances we have now, in which almost every State issues driver's licenses to noncitizens--including close to half of them issuing freely even to known illegal aliens, when we have got 30 million-plus noncitizens living in this country, 10 or 15 million of whom entered in the country unlawfully in the 4-year period between 2021 and 2025 alone.

This is a recipe for disaster, and we are kidding ourselves. We are lying to our constituents if we pretend otherwise.

Look, the core issue is not whether the law against noncitizen voting exists. It does. It is whether there are consistent, enforceable mechanisms to confirm eligibility, because if there are not, this law is fake, and it can't protect us; it can't protect anybody.

Pointing to an existing prohibition really misses the real issue: verification and enforcement. A law on the books is only as strong as the system used to enforce it. Federal law might prohibit noncitizen voting, but without reliable verification and cooperation between the States and the Federal Government and a reasonable mechanism by which the Federal Government may gain access to or insight into the voter registration files to verify, to

confirm, as to whether or not compliance is taking place, then that prohibition is not going to be enforced--certainly, not meaningfully enforced, not consistently, not reliably. So much so that, over time, the legitimacy and the perception of legitimacy of those elections is going to be badly impaired, and that is precisely where things stand today.

This decision in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona created this massive structural gap. States administer Federal elections, like they do all elections. We don't want, we don't need, we never had, we never will have wholesale Federal election authority. This is appropriately left to the States.

But as has been the case since the dawn of the Republic, we are allowed to make rules in the form of laws that govern what happens specifically in the conduct of Federal elections, elections for Federal office. That decision left States administering Federal elections without consistent tools to verify citizenship at the time of registration or subsequently.

And, meanwhile, you have got these jurisdictions I have referenced-- including California; Washington, DC; Maryland; and Vermont--permitting noncitizens to vote in certain local elections. Well, those policies are limited to non-Federal elections on their face because otherwise they would be trampling on Federal law. They make it even more important to maintain clear, verifiable distinctions between those voter rolls used for local elections versus those that are going to be used in Federal elections. That clear separation and that possibility of verification between voter rolls is important. In fact, it is of such tantamount importance that it warrants us having this discussion today and requires us, as it were, to pass this law. It morally compels us to do so.

So this current system relies far too heavily on self-attestation, just a basic honor code. ``You are on your honor'' system--don't make it up--on fragmented State processes.

Instead of this fragmented and insufficient process, States should be anxious to make full use of cooperative verification tools such as data-sharing agreements or memoranda of understanding with Federal Agencies to confirm citizenship status where legally permissible.

That is what Utah has done. It is also what nearly every Republican- majority State in the whole country has done.

And yet the Democrat States--the blue States--refuse defiantly. That should tell us something.

And this is where the policy disagreement that is at the heart of this discussion becomes even clearer. While some States have pursued data-sharing arrangements and verification partnerships with Federal Agencies, others--led by Democrats--have refused to adopt these tools, defiantly so. This is cause for great alarm.

Even if improper or fraudulent noncitizen voting is rare, the absence of uniform verification means that we cannot even measure it with any degree of confidence. And that, in turn, means we have no idea whether the problem is great or small, or as some implausibly suggested, nonexistent. And that uncertainty itself undermines trust, and that trust is at the core of any system of government that relies on self- rule. Certainly, any constitutional republic founded on democratic principles, like ours, cannot afford and must never experiment with anything that can detract from that.

This legislation would close that gap by strengthening verification mechanisms, encouraging consistent cooperation, and ensuring that Federal election rules are backed by enforceable processes--not just assumptions, not just faith and hope that everything will turn out well because, after all, nobody is going to do anything bad.

Well, we know through sad experience and through an understanding of the human condition that faith, hope, and trust without any verification are no adequate system for any form of government.

We see it depicted everywhere, and we have heard it recited from great Presidents throughout history, including most recently Presidents like Ronald Reagan have talked about the need to trust but verify.

We see it in architecture and the art of this building--constant reminders that we are to trust but verify.

On the balustrade designed by Constantino Brumidi just one floor beneath us right outside of this Chamber, there is this great bronze depiction of a cherub, an angel. On one side of the angel, we see a snake; on the other side, we see a dove. To me, that has always conjured biblical images of Jesus' admonition to be wise as serpents but harmless as doves.

We see it in Statuary Hall, the old House Chamber--Enrico Causici's classic sculpture called ``Liberty and the Eagle.'' You have this angel with her right arm outstretched, holding a scroll, which we presume to be the Constitution--maybe the Declaration; maybe both. I don't know. On one side of her, there is an eagle preparing to take flight. On the other side, there is a bundle of sticks--known in architectural and artistic terms as a fasces. It is the symbol of ``e pluribus unum,'' that we are stronger than the sum of our parts. Normally, the fasces is bound up by leather straps or ropes. This one is bound up with a snake. It is another of these conjured biblical images--wise as serpents, harmless as doves.

It is something buried deep within our DNA as Americans. It is something that inheres in any constitutional republic like ours--trust but verify. Be wise as serpents but harmless as doves.

In the Book of Matthew, some of this stuff can be found in the teachings of Jesus and within the same sequence of verses that tell us to beware of wolves in sheep's clothing--again, the importance of remembering to trust but verify.

So the concern is not simply that noncitizen voting is or might be or might later become widespread but that the absence of uniform verification standards makes it difficult to impossible to measure, detect, or confidently rule out ineligible participation.

Fraudulent votes--cast by voters who may or may not be nice people, may or may not be friendly to the United States, may or may not be agents of a foreign power but are not citizens and are thus prohibited from voting in our elections. In that context, the legislation is framed as a preventive measure strengthening verification, improving transparency, and increasing public confidence in Federal elections.

Look, if States are going to administer Federal elections, which they do, and I hope they always will, they should meet, they must meet certain baseline standards for verifying voter eligibility--including cooperation with Federal data systems where appropriate.

Even if noncitizen voting turns out to be rare, the current system makes it difficult or impossible to detect that with any degree of confidence. Even if it were rare today--a point that I am not willing to concede--we have no guarantee that it would remain rare for very long. Why would it remain so when it is so easy to carry out this form of illegal voting with virtually no chance of detection, apprehension, or penalty as a result?

A law that strengthens verification and ensures consistent cooperation is not redundant; it is not unnecessary; it is not a nuisance. It is a necessary, indispensable step to make existing prohibitions enforceable and credible.

So what else did they argue? Well, they have a whole bunch of arguments. One of the arguments that they make goes something like this. It relies on the fact that in 2023, the Brennan Center for Justice partnered with VoteRiders, the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland, and Public Wise to survey Americans about what identification they possess and what they know about voter ID laws in their State.

They asked respondents whether they had documents that proved their citizenship--a passport, birth certificate, or naturalization papers, as the case may be--whether they had them and whether they had them readily available.

Their research indicated that more than 9 percent of American citizens of voting age, or 21.3 million people, don't have proof of citizenship readily available. Now, they note that there could be many reasons for this--that documents might be in the home of another family member or in a safe deposit box. At least 3.8 million--or so they concluded--don't have these documents at all, often because they were lost, destroyed, or stolen.

So on that basis, some are arguing that the SAVE America Act, if enacted, would somehow disenfranchise 20 million or so Americans. Well, let's see if we can disentangle this argument so we can respond to it.

I have some questions.

First, did the Brennan Center verify the citizenship of the respondents? What if only noncitizens responded to the survey? If that were the case, then certainly those folks wouldn't have access to those documents that prove citizenship because they wouldn't be citizens.

Second, let's assume that they positively verified the citizenship of those surveyed. Even if that were the case and even if those surveyed did not have access to the documents noted in the survey, it would not change the reality that this legislation does not disenfranchise them or anyone who is a citizen or keep any citizen from registering to vote.

The bill allows for use of more than just the documents noted in the survey, and importantly, it includes multiple fail-safe mechanisms to provide flexibility and to ensure that those who may not have their documents due to whatever mishap or misfortune they may have encountered--to make sure that they can still register to vote with the help of an affidavit submitted to an election official, an affidavit setting forth the basic facts surrounding their birth if they are natural-born citizens or surrounding their naturalization if they are naturalized citizens.

So to the Brennan Center and to those organizations and individuals who have been peddling this false narrative of voter suppression and disenfranchisement--which, remember, is a really aggressive claim suggesting that 20, 21 million Americans will be disenfranchised if this becomes law--that is a lie. That is an absolute lie. It is just not true.

To those peddling this lie, I strongly suggest--I implore you to check your cross tabs, verify your survey participants, do your homework, and more than anything, even if you don't spend any time with the survey at all or inspect the methodology, read the bill.

If you just read the bill, you will see right there in black and white, in plain English, in the bill now before us that was recently passed by the House of Representatives that we proceeded to yesterday-- go to page 12, line 22. Right there in black and white, you will see this is so much easier than anyone is making it out to be.

Those who are lying about the bill are ignoring this provision altogether because whether you are missing one document or you are missing all of them, either because your house burned down or your dog ate them or you never had them to begin with or you belong to some religious sect that doesn't allow you to keep such documents in the home--I don't know if such religious beliefs exist, but if they do, somebody might raise them. They can still get around this because all they have to do is, when they register to vote, swear on an affidavit setting forth the basic facts behind their citizenship, and the burden then shifts to the State election official to confirm or refute those basic assertions to which they have sworn under penalty of perjury are true, and they can carry it from there. You don't have to shell out a dime. You don't have to go back to grandma's house and dig through a mountain of documents in order to find the magic documents.

Now, I will note here that there are other circumstances in which you have to prove who you are. There are other circumstances in which Americans routinely are required to not only show who they are with a photo ID but to prove their U.S. citizenship.

Perhaps the most common of these can be found in the form known as the I-9. Any American who has ever worked as an employee has filled out an I-9. You cannot get a job and begin new employment as an employee without filling out the I-9. When you fill out the I-9, the I-9 is very, very prescriptive, and it is very strict.

There are a few ways you can establish citizenship. One is through a U.S. passport establishing the fact of your citizenship. If you don't have a U.S. passport, as many people don't, you can supply a birth certificate and, with the birth certificate, a form of government- issued photo ID. In some instances, a social security card gets factored in. But it is very rigid. It is very prescriptive.

It is very, very important for us to remember that this is far easier than anything in connection with the I-9 form.

So if you have ever had a job, you have already had to prove your citizenship, if you are an American citizen, before starting that job, and you have had to do so under a set of standards far more exacting, far less forgiving, far less permissive than what we are dealing with right here.

So this whole argument about 21 million people being disenfranchised--well, I mean, even 1 person being disenfranchised--it is a lie. You have to willfully, consciously disregard and lie about the existence of the text beginning on page 12, line 22 of this bill.

Another argument that gets raised is that the right to vote is constitutionally protected as a right and it should not be restricted by requiring documentation. Now, this is an interesting argument. There are lots of constitutional protections that we have. Yes, we have multiple constitutional protections that deal in one way or another with the right to vote. Voting is important. The Constitution not only protects that, but it is built around your right to vote. But it doesn't mean, it can't mean, has never meant, and will never mean that the government can't take steps to make sure that people are voting lawfully and that they are entitled to vote. To suggest otherwise would make a mockery of all elections.

The fact is that we have done everything we can to make this bill comply with our mantra: Let's make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.

There are some in this body who are perfectly content with forgetting the second half of that equation altogether and saying anything that makes it anything other than easy to vote must be unconstitutional because it is a constitutionally protected right.

It is hard to identify a single constitutional right that is not without some limitation dealing with, among other things, curtailing the risk of fraud, of manipulating a right to harm or injure others.

There are plenty of other constitutionally protected rights where you have to comply with steps in order to exercise them. The Second Amendment, for example, protects your right to bear arms. Yet, if you want to buy a firearm from any federally licensed firearms dealer, you have to fill out a fairly onerous set of forms; you have to prove who you are; you have to establish under penalty of perjury that you are entitled to own a gun, that you don't fall under any of the prohibited categories under 18 U.S.C. section 922(g), either as a convicted felon, as somebody who has been declared by a court of competent jurisdiction to be mentally insane, as an alien illegally or unlawfully inside the United States, or any of the other categories of prohibited persons under 18 U.S.C. section 922(g).

You have to submit this information with a government-issued photo ID, and then you have to wait--sometimes minutes, sometimes hours--in order for a background check to be completed.

Is this a burden on your Second Amendment right to bear arms? Yes, but it doesn't make it unconstitutional--just like whatever incremental burden that you face in establishing that you are who you say you are and that you are entitled to vote in Federal elections doesn't undo your constitutional right to vote. And it doesn't make this unconstitutional that we are just making sure that we don't make a mockery of our own elections.

(Mr. RICKETTS assumed the Chair.)

So the fact that something is a constitutionally protected right doesn't mean that you have a right to do it in a completely uninhibited manner. I don't know anyone who believes that. I don't think I have ever heard anyone make that argument here in this Chamber--at least not seriously. And, in fact, making it easy to cheat directly undermines the very same right that these people purport to be espousing because it undermines the right of law-abiding Americans to cast their vote and to not have their vote diluted, offset, rendered meaningless by noncitizen voting.

We just want to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. We can and we must accomplish both. We can't skip over either one.

Another argument is that the SAVE America Act somehow violates what they refer to as States' rights, which is a term I hate. It is a misnomer. States don't have rights; States have authority. Authority is the opposite of a right. A right is a privilege against authority, whether by a State, by the Federal sovereign, or otherwise.

So States don't have rights. I don't like it. It conjures George Wallace images, and it is a complete misnomer. So let's refer to that as federalism, State sovereign authority, the relationship between the States and the Federal Government, whatever you want. Don't call it States' rights. But a lot of people are calling it that.

And the people calling it that this week are the people opposed to this bill for completely ridiculous reasons that overlook the purpose of the bill, the text of the bill, and the constitutional structure in which we find it.

Look, States work to protect individual rights, with the authority granted to them by their State Constitution and within the bounds set by the U.S. Constitution. And, unfortunately, Federal law currently prevents States from using this authority to protect voters and the integrity of our elections when it comes to protecting the rights of voters by excluding noncitizen voter participation.

This law that we have been referring to is an existing Federal law, the NVRA--the National Voter Registration Act--which the Supreme Court decided prohibits the States from requiring proof of citizenship, even though the statute itself says nothing about that. That is the Supreme Court's conclusive, binding interpretation of it.

It needs to be changed in response to this ruling. It is a statutory interpretation, not a constitutional one, so we have the power to do that. It doesn't require a constitutional amendment--just a simple act of Congress--to do it.

So what I am saying is that, for those invoking federalism, the sovereign authority of the States, it is just nonsense. This is absurd. If what they are saying is that the Federal Government has no place operating here because it involves elections and elections are conducted by States, even when they involve Federal office, then the true remedy there would be then let's undo the NVRA because the NVRA is a Federal law that imposes obligations on States.

Nobody is calling for that. I am not calling for that here. But what I am saying is you can't accept the NVRA as law, which we all do, and simultaneously say that Congress may not make laws governing the election of Federal officials because that might infringe on the authority of the States. That is an absurd argument.

The only reason this bill became necessary is because we have an existing Federal law that has been badly interpreted, is prohibiting the States from making any inquiry into a voter's identity and citizenship, thus thwarting the purpose of Federal laws prohibiting noncitizen voting.

Here is another charge. This is an interesting one. Another accusation, another argument being raised against the SAVE America Act is that this legislation would establish a private right of action that could be used to penalize hard-working election workers. OK. That sounds scary to a lot of people if you don't do any inquiry, if you don't do any digging into what the law actually says because what we all imagine when we hear that--we think of these great people, whether they are employed full time by the State or whether they work during election season, either to help people register to vote or help them cast their vote or otherwise, and it would seem unfair to put them in the position where they could become subject to litigation over it.

But when you look into what the law actually says and the context in which it arises, it is not scary at all. It would be scary if we didn't have it. It would be unthinkable to not have it because otherwise the law could become completely meaningless and unenforceable, absent some sprawling Federal bureaucracy, which we are all loathe to create another one of those.

The fact is that private rights of action against election workers engaging in voter fraud already exist under Federal law--the same set of Federal laws that we are amending and that we were required to amend in this very act, making the SAVE America Act necessary to begin with. Those private rights of action already exist under these existing Federal laws. This provision in the SAVE America Act merely extends the same provision that exists elsewhere in the NVRA to violations of the additional requirements of this legislation. And it would be insane not to do it because, again, we would render that dead letter, just as we are rendering dead letter the criminal prohibition against noncitizen voting. That is not an argument against this bill; it is an argument for it.

Another argument is that Americans are simply not comfortable with government management of personal information for use in the database that would be used to help give meaning to all this: the Department of Homeland Security's SAVE system. This is a really interesting argument.

Look, the information that the Federal Government uses to verify citizenship is already in the Federal Government's hands. It is already available for its use. The State voter data is not fully made available to the Federal Government under existing law but should be in order to verify the citizenship of those voting in State-run Federal elections.

The U.S. Government is the only entity on planet Earth that has data already whereby we can ascertain the citizenship or lack thereof of anyone in this country; and it would be an absolute absurdity, an absolute shame, an absolute miscarriage of justice to say that the Federal Government can't use that, it can't maintain that database, and it can't use it in such a way as to prohibit noncitizen voter participation in the context of Federal elections. This is absolutely crazy.

Now, if we want to start talking about the Federal Government having too much data about us, look, join the club. Sign me up for that parade. It bothers me too. But it is really absurd to say that this one can't be used, especially because the citizenship data is already there. The Federal Government has already got all kinds of information on you, on me, on every one of us--more than I wish it had. But if there is anything, any set of data the Federal Government ought to have and maintain and be able to use, it is data on who is a citizen and who is not. Show me any American who believes otherwise, any American outside of this building, and I will be shocked.

Another argument is that the SAVE system is somehow a DOGE-like system, given to the same Department that runs ICE. Oh, horrors.

Look, for people who think that we should have immigration laws but we can't enforce them, it makes perfect sense why they want to oppose the SAVE America Act. They want to render vestigial our criminal prohibitions against noncitizen voting, just like they want to render vestigial our immigration laws.

In any event, this is a terribly misleading correlation. The SAVE system verifies citizenship and highlights ineligible voters. Citizenship verification happens across government. It does happen. It will continue to happen. It must happen. That is one of the fundamental duties of any government is to know and have access to information to ascertain whether somebody is a citizen. Verifying citizenship through the SAVE system would protect Federal voters, would protect actual American citizens who are allowed to vote while noncitizens are not.

Another argument: Well, if you don't have a passport, you won't be able to vote. And passports cost money. You are going to have to shell out close to 200 bucks in order to get one, and this is going to end up disenfranchising everybody who doesn't have a passport. This is one of the most pernicious lies in the entire pantheon of paranoid-fantasy- derived lies against the SAVE America Act.

See page 14, line 15, of the bill. If you don't have documentation, you don't have a problem. Page 14, line 15, is in the substitute amendment. In the text of the original House-passed vehicle which we are now considering, I believe that is on page 12, line 22.

Again, maybe your house burnt down and all your documents burned with the house. Maybe your dog ate your passport, your birth certificate, and every other document or maybe all that stuff got stolen when you went to Europe or Mexico. Maybe your Aunt Madge took off with all of them before

she went crazy and sent all of it to the dry cleaners and then ended up having all of it burned for some inexplicable reason.

No worries. Even if all that happens to you, there is this attestation process administered by State officials to put the burden back on the State--not on you--without a single additional document other than what you provide to them in the form of a sworn affidavit, made under penalty of perjury. You put the obligation on them to complete the process without a single scrap of official additional documentation.

Another argument is the SAVE America Act would somehow disenfranchise millions of citizens, including and especially women and persons of color. Look, no one--no one in this body, Democrat or Republican, should ever disrespect the dignity of racial minorities or women by claiming that they are somehow incapable of obtaining an ID and proof of citizenship. An ID is necessary in daily life to drive a car, to get a job, to board a plane, to open a bank account, or even to attend the Democratic National Convention.

Yes, you have to show who you are. Yes, you have to prove that you have the right to be there, to attend and participate in the Democratic National Convention. No, you will not get in; no, you will not be able to participate in that because you don't have the right to do that. You have to have the proper documentation to prove who you are.

So if this is somehow Jim Crow, then so, too, is the Democratic Party, the party which, after all, is the original gangster behind the Jim Crow movement. So this is stunning to me that anyone from that party, the party of Jim Crow, the party that subjected so many millions of Americans, over so many decades, to hateful, racist laws, prohibiting them from participating in the most basic activities of human existence, let alone their participation in civic life, in government, in education--for them to call this Jim Crow is inexcusable. It is illogical. It does not reflect well on them, and shame on anyone who makes that comparison because that is not what that is.

Moreover, the soft bigotry of low expectations comes into play in here and to every woman and to every racial minority I know is deeply, deeply offensive. Shame on anyone who makes this argument. It is not credible.

Mr. President, I have been passed a note from my friend and colleague the distinguished Senator from Minnesota. The distinguished Senator from Minnesota needs to speak.

I don't know whether this is in the form of a question to the speaker--

May I proceed? Thank you.

Mr. President, another accusation, another argument that is being made here that is quite spurious and that just isn't accurate is that U.S. elections are already free and they are already fair and so we don't need to mess with them; that we shouldn't mess with them; that if we do anything to mess with them, that will upset that.

Well, yes, look, Americans are promised free and fair elections. That means that the elections should be rid of any election fraud and any voter suppression because an election isn't free and it isn't fair if, in fact, we allow people who don't have the right to vote to vote, especially if we set in motion a sequence of events that will inevitably culminate in not just a few but ultimately thousands, then tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and millions of noncitizens to vote in these elections. This is not hyperbole, with an estimated 30-plus million noncitizens in this country and with nearly every State freely issuing driver's licenses to noncitizens--19 States plus the District of Columbia issuing them to even known illegal aliens.

And all you have to do is fill out the form and check the box and sign your name at the bottom. No problem. ``These aren't the droids you're looking for.'' I am just fine.

You think nobody is going to do that? You think a lot of people aren't going to do that? Shame on all of us if you fall for that. That is absurd.

The threat of noncitizen voting--the mere potential for it--violates these standards. Citizens should not have the force of their vote--the meaning of their vote--diluted, bastardized, adulterated by noncitizen participation.

The SAVE America Act works to verify and protect the votes of American citizens.

Now, here comes another one, an argument that is also really sophomoric--that is probably too polite, but I will use that term for the moment--that somehow the SAVE America Act will suppress voters generally but protect Republicans. That is offensive, and it falls under its own weight.

Look, the SAVE America Act will protect the value of each citizen's vote. It is utterly agnostic. It cares not whether you are a Republican or Democrat, a member of the Giraffe Party or the yet-to-be-formed national party of people who are opposed to vote for Democrats and Republicans, the Green Party, the Purple Party, whatever party you want to belong to, or no party at all. It protects your vote. It is party- agnostic.

It in no way, shape, or form controls the priorities that the voters bring to the ballot box or preferences one group of them over another and, instead, ensures the priorities developed into law by way of our elections accurately reflect the will of U.S. citizens and only U.S. citizens, because remember that concept of popular sovereignty that we have been talking about this entire time.

In fact, the entire 250 years of the American Republic, we have been talking about popular sovereignty. It is the fundamental building block of Congress, on which all of our laws and our Constitution and our Declaration are built--the idea that the people are sovereigns. We have no King. We the people are the sovereigns. We the people collectively enjoy that right.

Identifying what the franchise is and who has that right to vote is so fundamental to protecting the popular sovereignty. As the saying goes, if everyone is family, no one is. So too here--if everyone is a citizen or everyone has the same prerogatives as citizens, no one does. It ceases to be meaningful because it gets diluted past the breaking point.

Here is another argument that is patently fraudulent. On its face, it fails. It is made with reckless disregard for the truth or knowledge of its falsity when it is made--that the SAVE America Act would somehow require every American now registered to vote to reregister.

There is just not a scintilla of truth to this. I have never really known what a scintilla is. It is a very small thing. There is not even a particle of truth to this. It is not only guilty of being false; it is the very definition of false argument and should not be countenanced in this or any self-respecting legislative body.

Nothing--nothing at all--in the SAVE America Act, no plausible interpretation of it, would require voters to reregister.

At the end of the day, we can scan the horizon for as many straw-man arguments as we can fathom. I have yet to conceive of, much less hear articulated, any legitimate reason for anyone to oppose this bill, which in me raises a question--a question I don't like to ask myself: Why, for the love of all that is sacred and holy, all that is good in our constitutional Republic, why would somebody oppose this? What legitimate reason? Who benefits? Cui bono, as they would say in Latin. I don't know why, but it sounds more impressive when they say it in Latin. Who benefits from the status quo? Who benefits from allowing noncitizens to continue to register to vote?

And yes, it does happen. Those on the other side of the aisle continue to insist that it does not. It does. More information comes out every day on it, and it is going to continue to come out in larger and larger numbers.

I don't know whether it has anything to do with the fact that, so far, some of those--a whole lot of them--most of them that I have seen where they have dug in, looked at the voter registration files, looked at which way they have registered to vote--a lot of them happen to be registered Democrats. I hope that is not the reason, but it does make you wonder: Why are they so opposed to this?

If the best they could come up with is it is already against the law, well, there are a whole bunch of things that if we use that same argument, that argument would collapse.

Yes, it is also against existing law to sell alcohol to minors, and yet we have laws in place to make people identify themselves with documentation establishing who they are and that they

meet the criteria necessary to purchase alcohol.

We have countless other instances in Federal law, in State law, in daily citizen interaction in which we have to prove that we are who we say we are in order to access that which we want to access.

We don't flinch. We don't question it because we understand, when we allow somebody else access to--I don't know--our bank account, our medical records, our flight logs, our airplanes in interstate travel, our Social Security benefits, our veteran's benefits, our Federal benefits, hunting licenses, fishing licenses, ballparks, the Emmys, the Grammys, the Super Bowl, or the Democratic National Convention, bad things happen when we allow just anyone to come in, even if they don't have the right to do the thing that they want to do in the moment.

It is not only not wrong for us to insist on this proof; it would be morally irresponsible of us. It would be a reckless disregard for one of the most sacred principles underlying our constitutional Republic for us to ignore it.

I will not ignore that, and I intend to continue to come back here, day after day, week after week, as long as it takes until this bill is passed into law. The American Republic, the oath to the Constitution, and those who have elected to us this office require nothing less.

Madam President, we often consider difficult, complicated issues in this Chamber. It happens all the time. In fact, if it is not complicated, we sometimes wonder why we are devoting time to any particular matter. Very often, these are issues that don't enjoy consensus among the American people. We might have a degree of consensus over the existence of a problem but a thousand different ways of tackling that problem. In other instances, there might not even be consensus on whether a problem exists or what that problem might be. This is not one of those moments.

This issue could not be simpler. American elections are for American citizens. This is an assertion that is so elementary that its controversy is itself the only remarkable feature. There are 83 percent of Americans who support voter ID--83 percent. Out of 100 people, 83 of them believe that we need that. That is 95 percent of Republicans and 71 percent of Democrats. That is still 71 out of every 100 Democrats who agree with us.

Now think about that for a minute. How many issues in this country unite 83 percent of all Americans? This is one of them.

For months now, I have been working with colleagues, working with President Trump, and with citizens across this great country--citizens who have rallied behind this effort in numbers and with a degree of intensity that I have not seen in my entire time in the Senate, and I am now in my 16th year here. All of them are begging us to pass the SAVE America Act, not in a nonchalant, haphazard fashion but instead in a way that indicates they really feel it--that they feel it strongly, in fact. They understand the need for this.

I have heard one thing over and over and over again: Why would anyone oppose this? Who would oppose the notion that only American citizens can vote in American elections?

In this room, I can't imagine any of us would think that we, in not being citizens of the United Kingdom or of Yemen or of Japan or of the Philippines, could vote in elections in any of those countries. Why? Well, because we are not citizens of those countries.

If we happened to visit those countries, would that change anything? No, not a thing. What if we lived there for a few years but didn't become citizens? Still not. It still makes no difference. If we are not citizens, we wouldn't dream of being able to vote in their elections. Why should American elections be any different? Why should someone who is not a citizen of the United States of America be able to vote in a U.S. election? Well, of course, they shouldn't.

Look, the SAVE America Act takes those dynamics into account, and it says something very simple. It says that only American citizens should be able to vote in U.S. elections. And it does something very important. It

makes it easy to vote and hard to cheat. You need both of those ingredients to have a good election. It has got to be easy to vote and hard to cheat. You can achieve both at the same time just as you can chew gum and walk at the same time, but this is a whole lot more important than being able to chew gum while walking. In any free society that purports to have a representative government of any form, especially in a constitutional republic like ours, you must have both. You can't cut corners on either one. That is common sense, and yet here we are.

If you don't accept that only Americans should vote in American elections, then what exactly are you defending? Tell us why you want to make it easier for noncitizens to vote in our elections.

But, so far, what we have heard from Democrats is not that. What we have heard from Democrats in the U.S. Senate Chamber--and I say here ``in the U.S. Senate Chamber'' because that is different than Democrats nationwide wherein more than 7 out of 10 agree that we need reforms like what the SAVE America Act would bring about. It is only here in the Capital City of this great Nation; it is only here in this building--in Congress, in the House of Representatives and in the Senate--that this is considered volatile or somehow unacceptable by Democrats. It is only these Democrats who inhabit these hallways and who serve in these two legislative Chambers who regard this as somehow phenomenally controversial, and what we have heard from these Democrats here is nothing but fearmongering and outright lies.

Now, whether they themselves know that they are lies or they are just believing lies others have told them, that is a topic for a different day. I am not going to try to vet that out here. None of us can know what any other person is thinking or feeling, but I can assure you that these are, at their core, the product of fearmongering and of lies.

They told us that requiring proof of citizenship to vote in U.S. elections is somehow ``racist.'' The minority leader himself called this bill Jim Crow 2.0. Wow--what an accusation, what a crazy, absurd, ridiculous, and, frankly, insulting accusation. I think he owes the American people an explanation as to how requiring proof of citizenship to vote is tantamount to racial segregation laws. Racial segregation laws, under the banner of Jim Crow, the Democratic Party itself forced on a substantial portion of the American population over many decades in one of the most evil--evil legislative tirades in American history for a prolonged period of time.

Why he would want to draw any parallel to Jim Crow is beyond the ability of this Senator to understand. I don't get it. Frankly, the American people aren't buying it, nor should they.

They have told us that requiring photo ID somehow ``disenfranchises'' women. I can't think of anything more racist. I can't think of anything more misogynistic than saying people of color or women, whether married women or otherwise, are incapable of obtaining an ID and proof of citizenship. That is frankly insulting.

It is something that millions of Americans do every single day--often many times a day--to get a job, to board a plane, to open a bank account, to enroll in school, to shovel snow in New York City; for that matter, to go to the Oscars, the Emmys, the Grammys, the Super Bowl, almost any theatrical production, and, yes, to get into the Democratic National Convention. To get into the Democratic National Convention, you have to show photo ID, and you have to establish credentials showing that you have a right to be there and participate in that event.

So if the SAVE America Act is Jim Crow 2.0, then so, too, is the Democratic Party itself; so, too, are the campaign rallies hosted by my friend and colleague the Senator from Georgia, up for reelection this year, who recently advertised a campaign rally and announced on the same website that to get into said campaign rally, you would have to show photo ID.

We are not getting the story. We are not getting the complete story. We are not getting anything close to the complete story, and we are going to talk about that tonight.

Look, millions upon millions of married women navigate documentation requirements every single day for a whole host of reasons. To suggest that Americans, that women, that people of color are somehow incapable of doing something so basic is deeply, fundamentally insulting, and it is beneath the dignity of this Chamber and all who occupy it for these arguments to be raised here in this hallowed Chamber.

I can't think of anything more patronizing, more dismissive, more out of touch than telling Americans that they can't meet the same basic requirements that govern so many other parts of daily life--not just some people's daily lives but the daily lives of pretty much everyone in this country.

This bill does not suppress voters. It protects them. It treats them like capable citizens in a functioning republic and ensures that their votes actually do matter.

And let's be honest. There is only one reason to oppose this bill and what it does--one reason: They want to cheat. This bill makes it easy to vote and hard to cheat. They are happy with exactly half of the equation and not the other half. But you can't have both and have a functioning representative government. You can't have half of the equation and have a successful constitutional republic. It doesn't work.

Here is today's headline from POLITICO. I am not exaggerating this. I don't write the news; I just report it.

Why climate champions are sweating the ``SAVE America

Act.''

It goes on to say:

If Republicans do ultimately succeed in getting a version

of the bill passed, environmentalists and some Democrats fear

it could damage the democratic process ahead of November's

midterm elections and suppress the will of climate-minded

voters and candidates.

The level of hyperbolic panic, of paranoid fantasy from the Democrats and the media enterprises they control is telling, and it is stunning, because the only way this bill changes election outcomes is if those outcomes have been dependent on votes that shouldn't have been counted to begin with. If that is part of the plan, then I can understand the panic. That is the reality.

We are closer than ever to getting this bill across the finish line. Just a few hours ago, we voted to proceed to this bill, and that is because the American people have made their voices heard. They have shown up. They have spoken out. They have demanded that our elections-- their elections--be protected.

Failure here is not an option, and it must never become such because if we cannot secure the most basic element of our elections, of any free and fair system of elections, we are inviting a level of distrust that this country cannot afford.

I would say this to my Republican colleagues: If we do not act on an issue that commands this level of support, not just from our own base but from the entire spectrum among the American people--this level of support--we should not be surprised when the American people lose confidence in our willingness to fight for them if we fail to get it done and to do everything along the way in order to ensure its passage.

This is our moment. Stand for a simple principle. Let the American people see who is willing to defend their sacred right to vote and who is not.

I am confident that the principle at the heart of this legislation will, in fact, prevail. It will prevail because it is fair, because it is right, because it reflects the truth, because it reflects how our laws are written and how human nature interacts with our system of laws.

This is the line. We have drawn it, and we must defend it. You are either willing to say that only American citizens should vote in American elections or you are not. There is no middle ground.

Sure, we can talk about whether this word or that word would most capably accomplish what we need it to. We can argue over a semicolon here or a comma there. But unless we are talking about how to achieve the same objective of making sure that only Americans vote in American elections, we will have missed the boat in a very dangerous way.

The American people are, to be sure, paying attention--very close attention, indeed--because they understand what is at stake. They understand that if

their vote is diluted, it is taken from them; if their elections are compromised--if their elections are compromised--their voice is diminished. That is what this bill prevents.

So let's stop pretending this is complicated. It is not. If you believe, as I do, that only American citizens should vote in American elections, then this should be the easiest vote of your entire legislative career--not just that which has passed already but that which you are likely to see ever while you are here.

Now, sure, there are all sorts of votes about, you know, recognizing National Sofa Care Month or this or that awareness resolution, but in the world of actual laws coming into being in this Chamber, you are not going to find something much similar--much more true to this principle of being clear, of getting the message right, than this one, of this being a very simple equation. We have to get this done, and we have to get it right.

While we are on this topic, I want to talk a little bit about why this bill is necessary and walk you through some of the legislative history, some of the history in American law and American society that has made this bill so necessary and so timely today, because there have been times in our history when this wasn't the same risk that it is today. But it will help if we set the table by explaining how we got here and why it is that we need this so badly, so immediately, right now.

Let's start with something that happened about 33 years ago when Congress passed a law back in 1993 called the National Voter Registration Act. It is frequently abbreviated as the NVRA and sometimes known also as the motor voter law.

The NVRA says in essence that in any State that chooses to participate, as the overwhelming majority of States do--nearly every State participates--in any participating State, anybody going into a DMV to apply for a driver's license may simultaneously register to vote if they would like to do so. It made it easier for more people to register to vote doing something that most Americans--the overwhelming majority of all Americans do from time to time, which is get a driver's license.

So you could go in, and while filling out the paperwork, after establishing who it is that you are, you could also say, ``I would like, with this same paperwork, to register to vote'' because, after all, they have your address, they have your name, and they have other information about who you are.

So the same State that is processing your driver's license application can also in that same moment harness the power of a State to register you to vote. That is one of many things that made the NVRA appealing.

A couple of things have happened since the NVRA passed that warrant our careful consideration of this legislation now and that make this legislation so very necessary.

For one thing, over time, you have seen different trends in States in how they issue driver's licenses, to whom they issue them. There have been times when States didn't necessarily have occasion to even consider the question of whether or under what circumstances to give driver's licenses to those who are either not citizens of the United States or perhaps, in addition to being not citizens of the United States, are here illegally.

As some of this became a little bit more complicated when legislation passed in 2005 dealing with the REAL ID issues, with this move toward establishing a REAL ID driver's license that could have some indication as to whether somebody was a citizen, States have paid careful attention to that.

Most States today--the overwhelming majority of States today will issue a driver's license to a person who is not a citizen of the United States. In I believe 19 States, plus the District of Columbia, you could get a driver's license even if you are not just a noncitizen but a noncitizen who is here without documentation, without legal permission, authority to be here. If you are an illegal immigrant, you can still get one in 19 States, plus the District of Columbia.

So if you can do that, if you can walk into a DMV in any of those jurisdictions and check a box and sign your name, in theory, you can register to vote.

Well, some of this came to a head about 20 years after the NVRA was passed when, in 2013, the Supreme Court of the United States decided a case called Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona. In that case, the Supreme Court of the United States conclusively interpreted the NVRA as preempting out any State authority that might have otherwise existed when it comes to requiring proof of citizenship of someone registering to vote, using an NVRA form at a DMV while applying for a driver's license.

In other words, they said: Even if a State is worried about perhaps inadvertently registering noncitizens to vote, even if in certain circumstances they might have affirmative reason to believe that one or more voters are not citizens of the United States, they may not ask for any proof of citizenship in that moment.

Now, I believe that interpretation was misguided. I believe it was wrong as a matter of statutory construction. Justice Alito, my former boss, wrote a masterful dissent explaining why the majority got it wrong. Nonetheless, the majority ruling still stands. It conclusively interpreted the NVRA as prohibiting the States from making any effort to figure out whether somebody was a citizen as long as they were using the NVRA-supplied form when registering someone to vote.

This created a big problem--a big problem that a lot of people, myself included, hadn't thought much about until relatively recently, until just a few years ago. I got involved in this, started writing this bill 2 or 3 years ago when I put all of these pieces together and I realized what it could spell for the American Republic if we didn't solve the problem.

Without regard to what might have already happened and what might be happening today, when you play this forward, even if you were starting from the assumption that none of this ever happens, that nobody ever has registered to vote in the past who was not a citizen or never had voted in any election who was not a citizen--that is an assumption contrary to fact, but even if you were to reach that conclusion, you play this forward, and this could and ultimately will lead to a whole lot of mischief when you put all of those factors into the mix, especially when you consider what happened between 2021 and 2025.

On or about--I don't know--let's say January 20, 2020, through to January 20, 2025, there were policies in place in this country that led to relatively open borders, you might say, in which an estimated 10 to 15 million people entered this country unlawfully, with many of them here to this day.

(Mrs. MOODY assumed the Chair.)

Some people have estimated that the total population of noncitizens inside the United States today stands in the neighborhood of around 30 million people. That is a lot of people--a lot of people who, in most States, could apply for and receive a driver's license, particularly if they live in some States more than others. And all they have to do is walk into a DMV, apply for a driver's license, check a box saying, ``Yes, I would like, while applying for my driver's license, simultaneously to register to vote.'' And all that remains after that is you sign your name. And by signing your name, you are certifying that you are entitled to register to vote, that you are a citizen and not under any kind of legal impediment from voting. And that is done.

So even if you were someone who assumes, contrary to fact--and contrary to more facts that I believe will be coming out in greater detail in the coming days and weeks--even if you were someone who believes that this does not happen, that people don't register to vote if they are not citizens of this country, this still would be a trend, given all of the circumstances that I have just outlined, all the things that have happened since the NVRA became the law of the land back in 1993.

This is something that we should all very much worry about. This should concern us greatly; that is, you don't want people voting in a system in which they are not entitled to vote.

You think about every other circumstance where people vote. It is not just in U.S. Federal elections for Federal office, which is the concern of this particular legislation. In countless interactions--separate and apart from Federal elections, separate and apart

from State elections--people hold elections of one sort or another.

One set of elections that people sometimes encounter are within voluntary organizations or within a homeowners association. They might have elections to decide different issues, to elect their leadership. They might have those on a PTA, on different charitable organizations, fraternal organizations that they might belong to. In every one of those circumstances, you don't want somebody who is not entitled to vote, who is not part of the organization, to be casting a vote.

If it is a homeowners association, you don't want somebody who is not part of that organization, because they don't own a home within the homeowners association's jurisdiction, to be casting a vote. If it is a shareholder election in a corporate context, you don't want nonshareholders casing a vote. Why? Well, they don't have the same interest that the shareholders have.

We sure as heck don't want foreign nationals voting in U.S. elections because what unites us is the fact that we are citizens. We may come to things from different perspectives, different parts of the country, different origins. We might have inherited different language patterns, different languages, belief systems, political beliefs, cultural customs--whatever. But what unites us is that we are American citizens.

If you start inviting in and allowing those who are not U.S. citizens to do it, bad things could happen. You talk about the risk of foreign election interference. It is really significant here, as every American's vote is threatened to be diluted every time this happens.

Now, it is not just there that it matters, that we prove who we are or that we are entitled to do the thing that we want to do. Think of many other circumstances you encounter. When you go to the bank and you are going to withdraw money, we should all hope that any place anybody has money deposited on account isn't going to allow somebody else to show up and withdraw money from that account without having to prove who they are. That would be its own form of chaos.

When people go to pick up a prescription drug, to go to the doctor, to seek medical treatment, to apply for a hunting license or a fishing license, to apply for Social Security benefits, to board a plane, to pick up theater tickets, to do all kinds of things where it matters who you are, your ability to engage in the activity that you want to engage in depends, hinges, on your ability to demonstrate that you are who you say you are and you have the right to participate in the thing you want to participate in.

Harkening back a moment ago to my discussion of the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic National Convention would be crazy to allow people in there who have not been elected as delegates to the Democratic National Convention--same with the Republicans. And so what do they do? Well, they have to show ID.

What about here? Look, in order to get here, all of us who have been elected to the U.S. Senate had to go through a series of processes and procedures that involved showing who we are and that we are entitled to participate in this process, in several, very meaningful steps.

I remember, the very first time I filed to run for the U.S. Senate, I had to go to the Lieutenant Governor's office. The Lieutenant Governor in Utah, under the Utah Constitution, performs the secretary of state function. It is the Lieutenant Governor who oversees the conduct of elections in our State, and it is the Lieutenant Governor's office that files and processes the candidate filing information.

I had to go to the Lieutenant Governor's office all three times I have run for and been elected to the U.S. Senate, establish who I am, establish my citizenship and my residency in the State. And, of course, there is payment that has to go along with it. And after all of that process, you have the opportunity to be on the ballot. If everything goes well, if you are nominated by your political party or otherwise get on the ballot, then you are considered.

But long before any of us ever showed up here to cast our very first vote or give our very first speech as Senators or even be sworn in, there was other paperwork that we had to process in order to establish who we are and that we have a right to be here and that we have a right to cast a vote.

Obviously, we had to win elections. So there is a very important document without which I wouldn't be here, without which any of us wouldn't be here: our election certificate. In my State, again, that too is issued by the Office of the Lieutenant Governor, performing that secretary of state function, that certifies the election results.

All three times I have been elected to the U.S. Senate, I have had to produce that document, and that document has been sent by the Lieutenant Governor of the State of Utah to the Secretary of the Senate, who had to review that.

I had to produce ID when I showed up here in multiple forms. In fact, I had to, just as everyone does, every time they start a new job as an employee. If you are an American citizen, anytime you start new employment with a new employer, you have to fill out a form. The form is called the I-9. It is not just that you fill out the form. You have to fill out the form, and you have to produce, yes, proof of citizenship--because if you are not a U.S. citizen, then you have to produce a visa, and you have to show that your visa status allows you to have the type of employment from the employer that has hired you. But even if you are just an American citizen, you have still got to prove that.

And the I-9 and the requirements that go with it are very exacting. As I recall, there are a few ways of proving that. You can prove it by showing up with a U.S. passport. If you don't have a passport, as many Americans don't, then you can show up with a birth certificate and a government-issued photo ID. At some point there has been a Social Security card involved, but not everybody I know carries around their original Social Security card all the time. So there are other ways that allow you to do it without the original Social Security card, but there are other ways of doing it. But it is pretty exacting. And you can't start the job unless or until you have proven who you are and that you are a U.S. citizen.

Now, when we wrote the SAVE America Act, we allowed for those same documents to be used in order to establish your citizenship. But we didn't stop there because even that, in some circumstances, could be more difficult for some people. So we made it even more flexible. Yes, you can establish it by producing a U.S. passport, if in fact you have one, if that U.S. passport establishes your citizenship; likewise, a passport card, if you don't have the whole thing, and that establishes your citizenship. You can do it by a REAL ID-compliant driver's license, if that REAL ID-compliant driver's license also establishes your citizenship conclusively, as some do and others do not. That will also suffice. As with the I-9, you can also do it with the combination of a birth certificate and a government-issued photo ID.

But in addition to all of those things, we also have some catchall exceptions that cover all kinds of territory, including one of my least favorite arguments but one of the most frequently arising arguments that is made, that somehow this is going to disenfranchise women everywhere, especially married women who obviously, at the time of their birth, neither they nor their parents could have had any idea, first of all, when or whether they might be getting married; secondly, if and when they got married later, whether they would choose to take on the last name of their husband, of the person they married, and what that name would be.

This isn't really a problem. I mean, this actually happens all the time in other contexts. Whether it is for your interaction with the Internal Revenue Service, with the Social Security Administration, a driver's license, there are all kinds of ways to deal with that. And the SAVE America Act makes clear, if you have changed your name as a result of getting married, obviously a marriage certificate will suffice. If you change your name through some other mechanism, some record of the change in circumstance, whether that is an adoption certificate, a divorce decree that with it came another change of names, you can supply that.

But it also contains something else that is available not just for people who have changed their name but people in lots of other circumstances in which, for whatever reason, they don't

have the documentation. So imagine, for instance, that you are somebody who had changed your name upon getting married, but you can't find your marriage certificate. No problem. We take care of that as part of the same provision that we take care of those who may have lost all their documentation of all their citizenship. Maybe their house burned down yesterday and everything is gone. Poof, up in flames--it is gone. Maybe your dog ate all of your documentation that you would otherwise use when starting a new job and filling out your I-9 form. Maybe you never had it to begin with. This bill takes care of it. We made clear of that. We went out of our way to make sure that that would be the case.

In this legislation, the House-passed SAVE America Act that we proceeded to just a few hours ago in the U.S. Senate, it can be found at page 12, line 22. Or if you want to look at the Schmitt-Lee substitute amendment that may be discussed later this week, it is on page 14, line 17. Either way, the text says the same thing: If you don't have the documentation, whether of a name change or of any of it, you can supply it by a sworn statement that you yourself can fill out, a sworn affidavit in which you provide the basic details surrounding your birth, if you are a natural-born citizen of this country, describing when and where you were born, to whom and so forth; or if you are a naturalized citizen, the circumstances surrounding and dates involved in your naturalization. You then hand it over to the State election official who is in charge of those things, and it then becomes the burden of the State to confirm or refute what you have submitted under oath, under penalty of perjury, to do this, with the understanding that if it checks out, if you are who you say you are, you are still going to be able to register to vote and, in fact, cast a vote, notwithstanding the fact that you may not have any of those documents, either because your house burned down, your dog ate them, or you never had them or otherwise.

So these arguments are not legitimate, and these arguments, which I see made every single day--sometimes in this Chamber, sometimes on social media or elsewhere--these are false arguments made with knowledge of their falsity or reckless disregard for their truthfulness or both. And they are inexcusable. They do not carry water.

This is all about making it easy to vote and hard to cheat. We have to do both. We must do both.

Now, getting back to what I was talking about a minute ago, when we show up here, by the time we have shown up here, we have had to establish who we are, our right to run for the U.S. Senate, and we have to produce other documentation showing that we have, in fact, been elected to the U.S. Senate.

When we do that, we also have to fill out the I-9 form here and establish, again, that we are who we are, who we say we are, and that we are, in fact, U.S. citizens. And if we do all of that right, then they give us a sort of cheat code version of the documentation, this pin right here.

I remember when I first got here, the day I was sworn in, January 2011, after my first election had occurred a few weeks earlier in November of 2010, I stood right over there. I was sworn into the Senate.

Right after I was sworn in, they had me sign a little book indicating that I was, in fact, sworn in as a Senator, and they gave me a pen and then they gave me this little pin. I wasn't sure what to think about the pin. I am not really into accessories or jewelry, but it was in a nice little box, and I wasn't sure what to do with it. Because I don't wear such things frequently, I put it in a drawer of my desk and I closed the drawer and I kind of forgot all about it.

After I had been here for a while, I commented to one of my colleagues: Is it me or does everybody get carded a lot here?

When I first showed up, I had a great head of hair, by my standards today. It is gone now. But I looked young. I was 39 years old when I was elected to the Senate. In the Senate, being 39 can feel like you are sort of like 12 years old or something like that.

I got carded a lot, in part, because I didn't--maybe I didn't yet look like a Senator to them. In any event, they didn't recognize me as a Senator, and I found, regularly, that I was having to pull out my ID, you know my Senate ID, and the cops would look at it as I would approach the building, make sure that the tamper-resistant strip was intact, and they would say: Well, I guess we have got to let him in.

I commented to a colleague saying: How long will it take before I stop getting carded every time I come into the Senate?

And this colleague said: Well, you got to wear the pin.

What pin?

Well, when you got sworn in, they gave you that little pin.

Then I remembered the little pin that came in the little jewelry box. I put it in the desk drawer and I closed the drawer and I forgot all about it.

I said: Why do I need to wear the pin?

They said: Well, the security personnel in and around the Capitol recognize that pin because it is worn only by Senators, and it is sort of like your portable ID badge. You won't have to get carded as much.

Ever since then, I have worn the lapel pin, and it works like a charm. I have even named it. I call it my ``Sorry, Senator'' pin because if I get carded, I point to it, and they say: Oh, sorry, Senator. You can come on in.

I remember one day I was standing over there at one of those desks in between two votes. I had one arm gently resting on the desk in front of me. One of the nonuniformed security personnel came up to me and said in a somewhat harsh tone of voice: Excuse me, sir. Will you please not lean on the Senator's desk.

I, still being new, I was very sensitive to not want to do anything wrong.

I said: I am terribly sorry. I will try not to put any weight on it-- because a lot of these desks are original equipment, which means they are, you know, 150 years old or more, and we want to be careful with them. I thought he was concerned about the fact that I had one arm gently resting on the desk in front of me.

But the inquiry was not over. He wanted to interrogate a little bit further. He then said: Are you with minority?

The Republicans--I am a Republican. We were in the minority party at the time.

Are you with the minority?

I said: What do you mean, on this vote or the next? I often vote with my party. Sometimes they get it wrong. Sometimes I don't vote with my party. I am not sure why you are asking this.

He said: Are you with the minority leader?

And I said: Well, he is our leader. Why wouldn't I be with him? I don't understand your question. Is this a loyalty test?

And then he asked me another question that made me realize what was really going on.

He said: Are you part of the minority leader's staff?

Then I realized, oh, OK. That is why I am getting the third degree.

So I pointed to the ``Sorry, Senator'' pin, thinking that would be the end of the inquiry. All it got me was a blank stare for some reason.

And at that point, I realized what was happening, and I used my title. I didn't want to use my title. I don't like to use my title. It makes me feel uncomfortable to this day, even after 15, going on 16 years.

So I kind of mumbled the answer. I said: I am Senator Lee.

He said: What?

And I said: OK. My name is Mike Lee. I come from the State of Utah. It is sort of squarish and chair-shaped. It is in the Rocky Mountains, best snow on Earth, really well-known place to visit.

And then he realized what was happening and what I was saying. And he said to me in one hurried breath: I am terribly sorry for the misunderstanding, sir. My name is Steve if you want to report me.

And then before I could tell him it was OK, Steve was fast, and he got out of Dodge. So he was too quick.

But from then on until the day he retired, I always said hello to Steve, and I smiled. I said: Hi, Steve, just to make sure there were no hard feelings because it was an honest mistake; it was not a big deal.

Steve retired a few years ago, and I miss him. Only recently it occurred to me that his name is probably not Steve. Maybe Steve is somebody he

worked with that he didn't like, but he was looking for that badge of authenticity. And when he finally saw it and contextualized it, he realized, yes, that is worn only by Senators. He can be here.

My point is this: In order for us to be here to make these decisions in this building, in this Capitol, affecting 350, 360 million Americans, we first have to prove that we are who we say we are and that we have a right to be here to make those decisions. So, too, with our elections.

We don't want people choosing those who will make laws on their behalf unless they themselves are the people who are the people referred to in the Constitution who get to make those decisions. So let's get this right.

Let's not get it wrong. Let's not pretend that this is something that it is not. It is fundamentally unfair and dishonest in every way, shape, and form to refer to this as racist, misogynist, as voter suppression. It is none of those things.

This is entirely about one thing, which is making sure that our elections are secure, that they are legitimate, that they are fair. We want to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.

Yes, we can have both of those things, and we must pursue both of them or in the long run, we will have neither. We will have none of them, and it will become a problem. So let's nip this thing in the bud, and let's get this right.

Let's make it easy to vote, and let's make it hard to cheat.

Nothing short of chaos ensues if we don't have that, especially whereas here we have an existing system of laws that make it so unbelievably, undeniably easy for someone to lie with no further proof, no proof of who they are, no proof of why it is that they have the right to vote.

So how does that happen, and how do they justify it? One of the most amusing, if bewildering, arguments that I hear--and I hear it all the time and have since the day we first introduced the original SAVE Act about 2 years ago--is that we don't need it. We don't need it. Why? Why don't we need it? Because it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote.

In fact, it is a felony offense. So we know it doesn't happen because it is already against law.

Well, let's think about how that would work elsewhere. Let's take a really familiar example. If you want to buy alcohol, you want to go into a bar or convenience store, liquor store, you want to buy alcohol, what can and should and must every American expect? To get carded.

Now, this is as a teetotaler something that I see mostly on TV and in the movies, but I also see it in real life when I see somebody buying something, something that I as a teetotaler don't drink, but you get carded when you buy alcohol.

It doesn't matter where, you are going to get carded. It doesn't matter how old you are, you are going to get carded.

Now, if it were acceptable there to say it is illegal for a minor to buy alcohol or it is illegal for anyone to sell or otherwise give alcohol to a minor, somebody who is too young to buy alcohol, somebody who is not yet past the age of 21, so they don't do it, so we don't need it because it is already unlawful--well, guess what would happen? There would be a whole lot more procuring of alcoholic beverages in retail establishments by people who are too young to drink. It would happen left and right.

It would be folly to assume: Well, it is already illegal, so it doesn't happen, so we don't need to do anything about it.

So what did we do? Well, we instituted a series of laws to make it so that you have to show ID when you buy alcohol. It doesn't mean that nobody can ever cheat to break their way through it. It doesn't mean that some people don't figure out clever ways of getting a fake ID or going through an intermediary, but there are more steps.

But to assume at the outset that it doesn't happen because it is already illegal, regardless of whether you are taking any steps at all to verify that somebody is who they claim to be and that they are eligible to do the thing that they are trying to do is absolutely ridiculous, and we cannot assume that our laws can be enforced, especially against the backdrop of the vulnerabilities that I have described.

The National Voter Registration Act, coupled with the 2015 interpretation by the Supreme Court in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, coupled with the trend among States to issue driver's licenses to noncitizens, with 19 of those States and the District of Columbia issuing them openly, even to known illegal immigrants, and then with an estimated 10 to 15 million Americans--some people think more--coming into this country unlawfully just in the 4-year period from 2021 to 2025, to say that we would be acting recklessly is a gross understatement.

So, no, this is not some sort of subterfuge to engage in Jim Crow 2.0 any more than the Democratic National Convention or a Jon Ossoff campaign rally is about Jim Crow 2.0--and shame on anyone who stoops to that level of stupidity and dishonesty as to make that argument--nor is this about voter suppression.

If this is about voter suppression, then literally any law that is designed to make sure that there is no fraud, that there is no cheating in elections, would also be voter suppression.

Now does it add a step? Yes, of course, but we add steps all the time to make sure that we don't make it too easy, especially when it matters for somebody to just go in and take something that doesn't belong to them. And by taking something that belongs to others, cheapening it for them, diminishing substantially the value of what those who actually have that right, who own that thing--namely, U.S. citizenship--would otherwise have access to, you are taking it from them. We can't allow that to happen.

This is why I am proud to be the original author and sponsor in the Senate of this bill, proud to have worked with my House counterpart Congressman Chip Roy from the great State of Texas on this legislation.

We can get this done. And now that we are on the bill, we are going to debate it. I look forward to hearing the debates. I look forward in each and every instance to being able to refute the absurd arguments against it because, let's face it, there is no legitimate reason to oppose this bill. I stand by that, and I will continue to stand by that in the coming days and weeks. And I am ready for many, many weeks.

We are going to stay on this bill until it damn well passes because the American people demand and deserve nothing less than that. Our Republic will not function, our country will not thrive unless we can protect the sanctity of the elections that determine who makes the laws, who sets the policy in this country.

We can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can make it easy to vote and hard to cheat at the same time. We can, we must, and together we will.

We must pass the SAVE America Act.

Madam President, I appreciate the skill and the passion that my friend and colleague the distinguished Senator from the State of Washington brings to the table on this. I appreciate her thoroughness in making the case that she has made to the Senate. I would like to address a few of those items which I think call for a response.

One of the arguments that she points to--all of the arguments that she points to in one way or another--reminds me of how important it is to turn back to the central objective of what we are trying to achieve here: Let's make it easy to vote but hard to cheat.

Again and again, she refers to the desire to make it easy to vote, but as to the ``hard to cheat'' point, she goes off on a number of tangents, and I would like to address a number of those right now to make sure we set the record clear.

One of the arguments she makes right out of the gate has to do with the fact that this is a constitutionally protected right, and she is right there. We have a number of freestanding constitutional protections in various parts of the Constitution that protect your right to vote.

The fact that it is a constitutionally protected right doesn't mean that it doesn't matter that we make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. In fact, it makes it that much more important to do it.

The fact that something is a constitutionally protected right doesn't mean that it has to be uninhibited. In fact, very often, as is the case with voting, if we make it easy to cheat, then your constitutionally protected right to vote will mean less and less with each passing election, and our failure to take these risks seriously further undermines the public's perception of the legitimacy of the rights in question.

Now, the mere fact that something is a constitutionally protected right doesn't mean you can't make it harder for people to break the law in gaining access to it. Otherwise, there would be all sorts of things that would be off in our society.

Take for example the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms. Yes, we

have a constitutionally protected right to bear arms, and it is a fundamental right that is available to individuals. Yet, when you decide to exercise that right by going into a federally licensed firearms dealer to purchase a firearm, guess what you have to do? You have to produce identification, and you have to wait a period of time. It might take a few minutes or it might take a few hours, but you have to wait until they run your identification and your information through some databases to make sure you are eligible to purchase a gun. It still is a constitutionally protected right. It doesn't cease to be a constitutionally protected right simply by virtue of doing that.

Never in a million years would you see my colleagues on the other side of the aisle or many in my party, I assume, saying: OK. This is all we need to do in order to deal with this issue since the right to bear arms is protected by the Constitution.

Yes, we have laws about who may purchase what firearm and when and under what circumstance and when they might be disqualified based on a prior conviction or otherwise from purchasing a firearm. All we need is a signature because, according to my colleague's logic, a signature is all the identification you need.

Well, is it? Well, signatures can be forged. With increasing ease, they can be forged. In other circumstances, they can be presumed not to be checked, and in some cases, that might pan out to be more true than in others.

But nobody would seriously suggest--particularly those who like these background check laws--they wouldn't be content with somebody just signing their name even if it said: I hereby declare under penalty of perjury that I am entitled to purchase this firearm, that I am an adult, that I am a U.S. citizen, and that I have not been convicted of a felony offense which would disqualify me under 18 USC section 922(g); nor do I trigger any of the other exclusionary factors articulated in various subsections of 922(g) or under any other Federal law.

The signature wouldn't do it there, and that is a constitutionally protected right.

This is a constitutionally protected right, but we are still making it, yes, easy to vote and hard to cheat. You have to have both. You don't get that if you have a mere signature.

It is so, too, with the purchase of alcohol or tobacco by minors. Even if you had people sign something saying, ``I hereby attest by signing this under penalty of perjury that I am, in fact, entitled to purchase alcohol; I am, in fact, at least 21 years old''--we wouldn't do that. Why? Well, it would be really hard to enforce the law at that point.

When we turn to the examples--and I tried to count the number of times she said it, but I think she said ``very, very, very, very, very, very, very little fraud in elections.'' OK. I understand that. Election fraud is extremely difficult to detect and therefore is rarely prosecuted. There have been very few cases of voter fraud actually having been discovered--detected--and prosecuted through to completion. Well, likewise, with other laws, if all you were required to do was to check a box and sign your name, there would be a lot of other instances of legal wrongdoing that would also be very hard to detect if that would be all you had to provide.

We have this known vulnerability in our laws here, and Heaven help us all if we don't acknowledge the vulnerabilities that we face and take reasonable steps to close those loopholes.

The fact that we are requiring documents here--yes, it adds a step. Now, there are a couple of things I need to be clear about.

No. 1, if you are already registered to vote, this doesn't undo your existing voter registration. We are not going to make hundreds of millions of Americans who are already registered to vote go back and start the process over again--that wouldn't make any sense--but it would apply to new voter registrations. If you move or if you register to vote in a new State or a new precinct and you have to establish a new voter registration file after this becomes law, then, yes, you would have to do that.

But, again, if you are an American who has ever had a job anywhere or who has started any new job at any point in your career with a new employer, you have already had to supply the same documentation. In fact, you have had to supply a much more rigid set of documents than what this requires because this, unlike that, allows you to prove it even if you have not a single document--not a single one of those.

Again, going back to page 12, line 22, and the sentences and paragraphs that follow, it makes it abundantly clear. Even if you are missing all of it, we have taken that into account, and we can put the onus back on the State to go back and prove you wrong. That is very different than just checking a box and signing your name.

Even if it does have some warnings attached to it, that is very different than having to supply the necessary information about how and where you were born. If you are a natural-born citizen, meaning if you were a U.S. citizen as of the moment of your birth, based on the circumstances surrounding your birth--either born on U.S. soil or born elsewhere to U.S. citizen parents--then you have to establish that. That is very different than simply checking a box and signing your name.

Yes, signing your name can be used to identify a person under some circumstances, but it is a lot less information than we are required to provide elsewhere.

She then makes this about what she refers to as States' rights. I don't like to use that term because I think it is a misnomer. It also conjures images of a bygone Jim Crow era in which the Democratic Party subjected substantial swaths of the American population to a set of racist, evil, exclusionary laws. It has a George Wallace connotation to it that I don't like.

Besides that, States don't have rights; they have authority. ``Authority'' is sort of the inverse polar opposite of a right. It is the ying to the yang that is a right. States have authority; people have rights. Rights are a check on authority, and that is what we are talking about here.

Regardless of whatever you want to call that--State sovereign authority, federalism, whatever you want to call it--it is not implicated here.

Remember, this objection is coming from the same party that, no less than 5 years ago, through a vehicle that, in the Congress empaneled between 2021 and 2023, was run by Democrats during a Democratic administration, under the auspices of a bill commonly known at the time as H.R. 1, tried to undertake a wholesale takeover of our Federal voting and election system.

Among other things, it would have subjected every voting jurisdiction in the United States to the status that today we equate only with section 5 jurisdictions. What that means is, anytime any voting jurisdiction in the United States anywhere--no matter how large or small, whether Tribal, local, State, or otherwise--wanted to redistrict, they would have to go to a political appointee at the U.S. Department of Justice and obtain preclearance. It is a ``Mother, may I?'' of sorts from Uncle Sam and Aunt Sam. It is something that is as fundamentally un-American, something as fundamentally contrary to federalism as we know it. This is the same party that is now making the federalism objection to this.

While we are on this Federal objection to this, let's remember the whole reason this is necessary in the first place is because of an existing Federal law passed in 1993 by Congress--the National Voter Registration Act. So the whole reason it is necessary to begin with is because of an existing Federal law.

Don't tell me this is an insult to federalism, especially if you are one of those people from that party who supported a wholesale takeover of our entire electoral system as recently as 4 or 5 years ago.

None of us should be surprised that leftist media establishments in the mainstream news media have come out against this because, let's face it, they are leftists; they are hardcore Democrats. Of course they don't want this, and of course they use this inflammatory language in their headlines.

``Ah, this is a threat to our democracy everywhere.'' ``This will disenfranchise 21 million American voters.'' Do you want to change that sentence to make it correct? Well, it could

be a whole lot of people who are not citizens. The only people we don't want voting are those who are not citizens and are not eligible to vote. That is all this does--easy to vote, hard to cheat--using documentary standards that are far more generous, far more flexible, and far more easy to comply with than any other system we have access to.

You can still do it. You can still satisfy this standard of proving citizenship even if all your documents have suddenly disappeared. You supply the necessary information under oath, under penalty of perjury, and then it becomes the State's burden to either confirm or refute those things, but with this specificity, we find it a lot easier to prevent fraud.

As far as chilling voter activity, we have data from a number of different studies showing that in States that have adopted voter ID laws, you don't drive down voter participation. In some cases, it goes up. It works out perfectly well.

We need not, we ought not, we must not fear this. If we fear this particular issue, we risk running afoul of that which we hold most dear about our electoral system.

Sometimes we get confused about what we ought to fear. We see this in nature. We fear the snake. We don't fear the deer. Yet, a few years ago, my wife and I were having this conversation. I don't know how we got off on this tangent, but we decided to look up your chances of dying as a result of an interaction with a rattlesnake as compared to your chances of dying as a result of an interaction with a deer.

Now, deer are cute. Who doesn't love Bambi and Bambi's mom and Bambi's dad? You know, it is all so great.

Your chances are way higher of being killed by Bambi than they are by a rattlesnake. Yet we fear the rattlesnake because it is creepy and it is scary.

When we fear the wrong things, we leave ourselves vulnerable to that which can harm us.

And perhaps we don't fear enough what happens when our elections lose their credibility because we don't take reasonable safeguards to make sure that only those who are legally entitled to vote in them are, in fact, allowed to vote.

So as far as the private right of action goes, that private right of action exists under previously enacted laws. I believe that one applies as a result of the original NVRA, and, possibly, some of it could be under the Help America Vote Act. But there are existing Federal laws that make that exact private right of action available, and all this does is it extends it to the obligations that arise under the SAVE America Act.

And those, too, are generous. They are generous to those State officials that are complying with them. If somebody identifies a problem with the way that the law is being implemented, if they are not complying with the terms of the SAVE America Act, there is a notice requirement to the State elections official in question. And it gives a certain period of time. I don't remember whether it is 30, 60, or 90 days. I think some of it may depend on the exact context. They have the ability to cure the harm or make the argument back as to why they are not, in fact, violating it.

So there is nothing scary about this private right of action. It is just a way of, without growing the bureaucracy, making sure that there is a means by which you can procure a court order requiring compliance with the law so that it doesn't become dead letter.

Look, on personal information--the Department of Homeland Security wielding personal information--well, if that is the case, there are all kinds of things. And if that is on the table--I mean, a lot of Americans don't much like how much personal information the IRS has, and that gets leaked sometimes. A lot of people don't like how much personal information can be found in the databases that are used in connection with the background checks that one has to go through when purchasing a gun.

That is just the beginning of it. There are all kinds of things where people are not comfortable with the government having access to too much information. Look, I get it. I am one of those people. I don't like it either.

But the fact is the government does have that information. Why not allow the government to use that information lawfully to make sure that those who have a particular right are the only ones who are allowed to wield it, so that it doesn't get cheapened or diluted or bastardized by those who would flagrantly violate the law.

At the end of the day, this is, in fact, about making it easy to vote and hard to cheat.

The Democrats in this Chamber seem, so far, to be very comfortable with the first half of that equation but not the second half. We have to pay attention to both. We ignore either to our own detriment and the detriment of those we represent.

Mr. President, 30 years ago today, my late father Rex Edwin Lee passed away after a nearly decade-long heroic fight with cancer.

Now, 30 years is a long time. Children grow up, so do grandchildren. Families expand, chapters open and close, and yet there are some people whose absences are always felt because the influence of their lives continues to shape those around them long after they have left us.

My dad, pictured here, was one of those people. He certainly was for me and I know for many others.

During his lifetime, he held many offices, received many honors. He was, by any measure, a giant in the legal world. To me, he was, first and foremost, my dad.

To my mother, he was the love of her life and the man with whom she built a family--a family of seven children, a family with evermore grandchildren and now great-grandchildren in their line of succession.

To his seven children, he was a source of energy, of steadiness, humor, discipline, fun, and love.

To his students, he was the kind of teacher who challenged views and inspired a love of the craft that was undeniably contagious.

To so many others, he was proof that brilliance and kindness need not be mutually exclusive, that a man could be formidable without being harsh, intensely accomplished without being self-important, and deeply faithful without being pious.

He grew up in a small town, St. Johns, AZ, a really small town that remained part of him throughout the rest of his life. He used to joke that he may have been 18 years old before he realized that the name of the town was not ``resume speed ahead.''

St. Johns was a sleepy little community, but it was home to him and so many he loved.

He was grateful for his roots and didn't carry himself like a man embarrassed by his smalltown beginnings. Gratitude was one of the great governing themes of his entire lifetime. He loved that the parable of the 10 lepers referred to the fact that only 1 returned to Jesus to thank him. He described this as this establishing what he called ``a human gratitude index.''

Gratitude, he would say, is, too often, far too rare, and it is one of the most uncelebrated but valuable virtues a human being can learn to possess.

However accomplished he became, he seemed to always be aware that life had given him much and that he owed much in return. Even as a young man, there were signs of what he might one day become.

He had a precocious love of language, argument, ideas, and persuasion. He attended Brigham Young University initially. I might add, when he first got there, he went there with a little bit less enthusiasm for that institution than he would later develop.

He had his eye elsewhere. In his small town of St. Johns, AZ, he had a couple of cousins, his first cousins whom he looked up to: Morris and Stewart Udall, just a few years older than he. They were the sons of his father's sister.

They had both gone to study at the University of Arizona. He wanted to follow in their footsteps, but his parents insisted that he spend at least 1 year first at Brigham Young University in my hometown of Provo, UT, but he took an almost instant liking to BYU.

When he got there, he was quickly elected as his freshman class president, and he noted how interesting this was to him that he was elected class president. His freshman class at BYU was several times larger than the entire population in the town he had been raised.

He flourished in every way at BYU. He was, just before he served his senior year, elected to student body president, an early sign of the leadership that would later bring him back to BYU, first, to build its law school and, ultimately, to serve as the university president.

Right in the middle of his undergraduate years, he left to serve a mission for 2\1/2\ years where he went to

Mexico serving as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That experience strengthened his faith, and it gave him an enduring love for the Spanish language, of the Mexican people, and the rich cultural heritage that comes with it.

He became fluent in the Spanish language and really understood features of the culture that stayed with him for the rest of his life in a way that many around him found remarkable.

Many years later, when I myself became a missionary, he and I developed a practice of writing letters to each other in Spanish, and I was often astonished, particularly during my first few months of my missionary experience, at his degree of proficiency in the Spanish language. I quickly learned to keep a dictionary close by because he was routinely using words that I had yet to learn.

I frequently have interacted with people, people who were born and raised in Mexico, who often described his proficiency in the Spanish language in a way that suggested to them, if they closed their eyes, couldn't see that they were talking to a gringo, you would think they were speaking to another person who had been born and raised in that country.

It was, by the way, during his time in Mexico as a missionary that he first laid eyes on and crossed paths with the woman who would become his wife and eventually my mother. Of all the victories he achieved in his distinguished career, he would have been the first to say that one stands above the rest, that is persuading my mother Janet Griffin to marry him.

By the time my dad reached the University of Chicago Law School, it had certainly become clear that his gifts were rather extraordinary. He ended up graduating first in his class from that institution, and from there went directly to serve a clerkship with Associate Justice Byron White, who was then a fairly new member of the Supreme Court of the United States.

After his clerkship, he returned to Arizona, and he worked for one of Phoenix's premier law firms, Jennings Strouss & Salmon, where he later became a partner.

In 1972, while I was just a baby, he received a phone call. Having received another phone call from someone in Salt Lake City a few weeks earlier, he had been told that the church was thinking about establishing a law school at Brigham Young University.

They asked him as a Latter-day Saint lawyer what he would think of that.

He said: I think that would be a big mistake.

Why?

Well, Utah--a relatively small State--it already has a perfectly good law school at the University of Utah. We don't need another one.

A few months went by, another call came, and said: You know about that law school that we talked about starting, the one you told us not to start?

Yeah.

Well, we are going to start it anyway. We want you to help us figure out whom to hire to run it. Could you help us find a dean?

He said: Sure. I will come up with a list of potential candidates-- knowing that the church probably wanted a Latter-day Saint who had been a faculty member at an accredited law school, and he came up with a good list of them.

When that conversation occurred, he thought his job was done. A few months after that, he got a call from Salt Lake City informing him he would be the founding dean of the yet-to-exist, yet-to-be-accredited, yet-to-have-an-entering-class, any-student-body, or any-faculty law school in Provo, UT.

It was, at that point, that my family moved from Arizona to Utah when I was a year old.

Again, there was no faculty. There was no building. There was no library. There were no students. He had to recruit all of this in just a few years' time, starting from scratch, not only without ABA accreditation but without any real promise that ABA accreditation would come.

Later in life, I realized how difficult this must have been. This is the first class, the charter class. It began in the fall of 1973.

I asked him: How on Earth did you do that?

He said: I just looked for really smart undergraduate students. I would find them. I knew where to look, and I would have conversations with them in which I did a heck of a sales job, and I promised them it would be a good experience.

Looking back on that now, I am not sure how I would have responded, but I do know that the charter class of BYU's law school went on to accomplish all sorts of things. They punched way above their weight. The school was accredited long before that charter class graduated.

My dad approached that job with his characteristic determination, and under his leadership, the J. Reuben Clark Law School at BYU began to take shape.

In 1975, a couple of years into that experiment, he took a leave of absence from the law school and went to Washington, DC, to become the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Having been invited to assume that role by Ed Levi, who served as the Attorney General of the United States under President Ford.

He would return back to the BYU Law School 2 years later to continue serving as dean.

He enjoyed that experience very much, and a few years later in 1981, he received another phone call and was invited to return to Washington to serve as Solicitor General of the United States under President Reagan. In that capacity, it was his job to represent the U.S. Government before the Supreme Court. He argued many dozens of cases during one of the most demanding and interesting periods of time in the Supreme Court's history. During his time as Solicitor General, he won 23 of the 30 cases he argued during that roughly 4-year period, during President Reagan's first Presidential term.

He held records both as the Solicitor General of the United States and later as an attorney in private practice before the Supreme Court for arguing more cases before the Supreme Court in a single term than anyone had in the Court's history at that point.

In 1986, he returned again to the faculty at BYU as a professor while working simultaneously as a partner at Sidley Austin, one of the Nation's finest law firms, where he helped found the flagship Supreme Court practice at that firm. From that point forward, much of his legal practice consisted of arguing cases specifically before the Supreme Court. For a lawyer, there are few greater privileges.

As a child, I learned something interesting. I learned that anytime I wanted to attend one of my dad's arguments, it was a very effective way of missing school. I had an almost perfect track record of this. I figured out what his argument schedule was, and when I saw it approaching, I knew that if I pled my case correctly, I could go and watch. More about that in just a minute.

Right before he died, he was still rehearsing in his mind, still preparing to argue what would have been his 60th case before the Supreme Court despite being confined to a hospital bed.

A lot of my own early exposure to the law came from watching him in court, often just as an excuse to miss school. I discovered to my delight that if I asked, they would usually let me go, and I would sit there in court as a young boy trying to take in the majesty of the place, listening to language I didn't fully understand and yet understanding just enough to know that what my dad was doing was important.

Over time, I learned to decode some of the language--not all of it by any means, but I started to play games. I could figure out which Justice was going to ask a question next, how the Court might respond to certain arguments. I even picked up subtleties of mistakes lawyers would commonly make that would usually make the Justices not respond well.

All of my siblings attended my dad's arguments from time to time, and for whatever reason, the law bug seemed to have bitten two of his seven children more than others. My brother Tom and I both became lawyers, entering our dad's profession.

As fate would have it, many years later, Tom and I, after entering the practice of law and having served in various capacities--law firms, government service--Tom later became a law professor at BYU's Law School. But back in 2010, within a 24-hour period, we both experienced different turns to

our careers. On one night in 2010, I won the Utah Republican primary in my first Senate race. The very next morning after winning that primary, my brother was confirmed by the Utah State Senate as a member of Utah's Supreme Court--a post he held for 12 years.

There were many influences in our lives, of course, but no one can seriously doubt the source of so much of that inspiration. We were raised by a father who loved the law with all of his mind and loved God and his family with all of his heart. Our father's faith was central to his life. He was a devout Latter-day Saint, and he taught all seven of us--my brother and I and our five sisters--he taught us how to pray, to read the Scriptures, to trust in the Lord, to serve and love others.

He served in many callings, many positions in the lay ministry in our church. He had a profound belief in religious liberty, and he thought carefully about why it mattered. He understood the structure of the Constitution. He understood the historical development of religious liberty. He understood the arguments of Jefferson and Madison and the distinction between the establishment clause and the free exercise clause and how they intersect and the jurisprudence that had grown up around those important guarantees.

But he also understood that for millions of Americans and so many billions around the world, religion is itself a covenant and a duty and a blessing. He understood that a free people cannot remain free if they are denied the right to live out the deepest obligations of the soul. He believed that. He defended that. He lived that.

At home, for all of his stature, he was never remote. Sometimes he had to go out of town, other times he might have to work long days at the office, but he always came home without too much time elapsing, and he was ever present when home. In fact, one of the wonders of my late father was that taking into account all he did, I don't think any one of us ever felt neglected, despite how many obligations he had.

When I was a boy, I decided to make some money by shoveling the neighbors' driveways after heavy snowstorms. I very quickly found myself during certain winter months with more work, more jobs than I could easily handle within a finite period of time. My clients, after all, demanded that their driveways be shoveled, and I didn't want to let them down.

My father offered to help me. I offered to pay him. He declined. I remember--I think his exact words were: Consider me your indentured servant. You don't have to pay me, but you can collect the money attributable to my labors on your behalf. Consider it my service to you.

So there I was, a boy with a small snow-shoveling enterprise, collecting the proceeds, while my father, one of the finest lawyers in America, worked beside me in the cold, helping his son keep commitments. He was still much bigger than I was and able to shovel a lot more snow than I was. He was there for me.

Another family story that captures something essential about my dad is a story I have always loved, a story that I have gotten from my brother Tom. Tom is a few years older than I am. When I was either very little or perhaps not yet born, my dad one day was assembling a swing set in our backyard in Arizona. He was using some specialized tool that had come with the swing set, specific to that set.

My brother Tom kept asking what that tool was called. My dad looked at it, a little confused at first, and then said: Look, I don't know what it is called, but when you need one of those, nothing else will do.

The same, as my brother has often observed, could be said of my dad. He was so many things at once, and he did so many things at once-- scholar, advocate, teacher, administrator, church member, husband, father, mentor, friend, patriot, and that list could continue on for some time. It is hard to reduce him to one word or even one set of words, but when you needed a person of exactly his unique combination of gifts and talents and interests, nothing else would do.

He had a genuine warmth and a mischievous side to him. He loved amusement parks and roller coasters and wasn't too dignified to shout both on the way up and on the way down on the roller coaster, especially if some of his teenage children were there, capable of being perfectly embarrassed by that spectacle of a grown man shouting at the top of his lungs.

In 1987, while he was still in outstanding physical condition--an avid runner, a marathoner--he was diagnosed with a very aggressive, advanced form of stage IV non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. It was a devastating cancer diagnosis. He was told by many of the doctors that he may not live more than a few months. Yet what followed from that moment was one of the most instructive chapters of his life.

He fought for months and nearly died during that initial period following his initial diagnosis, and then, through excellent medical care and what felt to us like a providential chain of events tantamount to miracles, he was granted more time, nearly 9 more years.

What did he do with those 9 years? Well, he didn't retreat into bitterness or caution. He didn't allow pain to become the dominant feature in his life, or the fear of subsequent deterioration of his health. He returned to work. He continued to serve in the church as the bishop of our local church congregation in Provo. He continued to teach as a professor at BYU while maintaining a full-time law practice. He continued to argue cases before the Supreme Court--something he loved, once commenting that is the most fun one can have in any activity that doesn't involve eating ice cream. He continued to be a father, a grandfather, a mentor. And he did so all without any complaint.

Just about 2 years after that initial diagnosis, which fortunately turned into remission, he was asked to serve as the 10th president of Brigham Young University--a position he had neither sought nor anticipated, but he did it willingly, gladly, grateful for the opportunity to serve.

He served with ambition and with purpose. During his presidency, among other things, he established an academic freedom policy and launched the university's first, ambitious capital campaign. He told me that when he designed this campaign to create BYU's first endowment, he intended to raise $250 million. They thought he had lost his mind. They thought they would never get that done. Well, it happened a few years later. They finished it under his successor, president Merrill Bateman, and his vision helped launch that.

At the time, BYU didn't have an endowment, but it began the work of building one. He laid the groundwork that made that possible, and it came to fruition just a few years after he died. Today, that endowment stands valued in the billions of dollars--a lasting part of his legacy.

He was proud to help bring about massive expansion of buildings on campus. He was thrilled with the opening of the BYU Museum of Art-- another enduring contribution to his service as president of the university.

Yet even those achievements are dwarfed by the less tangible part of his presidency. He created a culture on campus in which people felt they belonged. Students felt seen. Faculty felt and, in fact, were heard. There was a sense of shared purpose on campus, and much of that came from his ability to build genuine rapport with all of those around him. That spirit became one of the defining features of his time as president.

I remember talking with one of his law partners after he had died-- Carter Phillips, a longtime partner at Sidley Austin and a dear friend and colleague of my dad's. He said: Walking across BYU's campus with Rex Lee serving as president was unlike any experience I could ever imagine on any other college campus in America--a combination of walking across the campus with someone who is at once royalty, a rock star, a sports star, and everybody's buddy, and also just a revered academic figure.

He said: I have never seen anything like it. But people liked him, and they greeted him with a smile.

In March of 1990, less than a year after he had been installed as BYU's 10th president, cancer came calling again, and that cancer diagnosis was a troubling one. I remember when he informed me one morning in March of 1990 that they had rediscovered cancer. It was a slightly different form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

He said: This one is more aggressive, less amenable to treatment. This one will take my life. It is just a question of how long, but we think we can stretch out my lifespan by a number of years through aggressive treatment--which he continued to receive almost entirely during the time he continued to serve as BYU president while continuing to still argue Supreme Court cases every single year. That was part of the deal he made with the university. He would do that if they would let him keep his hobby of arguing one or two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court a year. They relented.

Fast-forward a few years to the winter of 1996, the early months of 1996, late February. I remember taking him to the hospital for what would be his last hospital visit a couple weeks before he died. He had an oxygen mask over him helping him breathe. He was mostly unconscious. But as a second-year law student, I understood the words that he was muttering under the mask, and I associated them with one of the cases he had been briefing and was hoping to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court--what would have been his 60th argument.

He was almost unconscious as we were wheeling him in and yet still he managed to continue that fight. He was, even in those fading hours, still preparing in his mind for what he believed would be his next argument before the Supreme Court. That was my dad to the very end--he was ready to make the case.

I will never forget the moment I experienced it--exactly 30 years ago today--as a young law student, right in the middle of my second year of law school. When that day arrived, we knew something was afoot. I had to go back to law school for a few hours for a class. We knew he would likely not survive that day.

Early in the morning, I was at the law school already, preparing for class. I looked out the window, and I saw the Sun rising over the Wasatch Mountains, over the Y Mountain, and Squaw Peak Mountain, which was close to our home and close to the law school. I realized that day that the Sun was rising over those mountains for the last time that he would inhabit this Earth. I knew that the world would be a sadder place without him.

Just a few hours later, I went to class, and I went down to his hospital room in the intensive care unit, where all seven of his children and my mother surrounded him. I called Sharon, my wife, just before I went down there, realizing that things were about to change. She was at home with our two 1-year-old twin boys, James and John, and cried for herself and for me and the rest of my family as I told her we were about to lose him.

As the end drew near, we could tell by his vital signs that it was happening. I kept looking at him, thinking: I wish I could download everything that he has got in there. I need this knowledge--this vast reservoir of the law, of human relations, of how to be a good follower of Jesus, of how to be a good neighbor and friend. I want to download all of it.

I knew that was in vain. We don't have the technology to do that. We didn't 30 years ago, and we still don't. But I knew I needed to learn everything about him and that I had an abundant supply of things that he left behind in his writings, in his speeches, and in his interactions with people with whom I interacted on a regular basis.

As I reflect back on these 30 years without him since he has been gone and how fully his influence remains, I hear him still, and I still hear a lot of the advice that he gave me: Use the simple word if it will do. Never use a 3-dollar word if a 10-cent word will suffice and get the idea across. Be kind. Give others the benefit of the doubt. When you have won your case, sit down, and don't say another word. Do not spoil a good argument by saying one word too many. And for the love of all that is sacred and holy, when asked by a judge in a courtroom a question--even the most remote, hypothetical--answer the question. Don't try to dodge it. You will regret it.

The older I get, the more grateful I am for these and so many other valuable words of advice I got from him--grateful not only that he was admired but that he was admirable; grateful not only that he was brilliant but that he was good and kind; grateful that his ambitions were elevated by faith; grateful that his public life never consumed his private duties and never eclipsed, in any way, anything else that he had to do.

If he were here, I would tell him that we still miss him, that we still love him, that his example lives on and still instructs us, that his faith still steadies us, that his gratitude still shames our own occasional forgetfulness, our own departure, or our own falling into the trap of what he called the human gratitude index; that the things he built, both in institutions and in people, continue to endure.

Most of all, I would thank him. Thirty years later, I still feel now what I felt then.

I miss you, Dad. I love you, and I thank you.

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

I call up my amendment No. 4236 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. President, this amendment would strike the earmarks from this bill. In this bill package, there is about $7 billion in earmark spending.

Now, a lot of people like to say: I don't like those other earmarks, but I like my own. So I am going to vote for all of it so they can all stay in there.

Remember, the Republican conference, back in 2010, adopted an earmark moratorium. This was converted into a permanent earmark ban, in 2019, that is still in effect, which shouldn't be ignored.

What do these $7 billion do? Well, among other things, they do a lot, including a whole lot of them in spending on ``woke, wasteful, and unjustified'' spending: for recipients to fund housing and legal aid for illegal aliens; puberty blockers for kids; building EV charging stations, part of the ``green new scam''; subsidize California's disaster rail system; fund infrastructure and renovation projects at the wealthy Met Museum and the Michigan AFL-CIO; a dance festival in Massachusetts; DEI initiatives.

Look, we don't need this. We don't want this. This is what is driving the train toward the $38.5 trillion debt that we are adding to at a rate of $2 trillion a year. It is unacceptable. It must end.

Support my amendment.

Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 4286 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. President, something happened very significant this morning. This morning, it was announced that the Chief Financial Officer of this Agency, USADF, has been charged and simultaneously pled guilty to corruption charges this morning. The Department of Justice just announced it.

Also, we have received word from the Acting Chairman and CEO of USADF a request that we defund this entity because, as he put it, it is trash and, as he put it, it is a corrupt culture of waste, fraud, and abuse. So when the Acting Chairman and CEO of an entity that is getting all this public funding--all these millions of dollars--says defund it because we have a problem here--meanwhile, the DOGE office at the Department of War, today, echoed that and agreed with his assessment-- please, colleagues, join me. This one is not an earmark. This is spending within the bill--spending within the bill where the head of the entity asked us to defund it because the culture within that entity is impossibly corrupt. We must end it. Please support my amendment.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for 10 seconds to respond.

Mr. President, the fact that the acting president and CEO is a DOGE individual doesn't disqualify him from making this statement. It is corruption. Sure, it has been going on since the eighties, but so have a lot of things that are corrupt. We must defund this now.

Vote on Motion

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

Mr. President, I have come to the floor today, once again, to raise objections--in fact, deep concerns--about something known as congressionally directed spending, but the more colloquial term for what I am describing is ``earmarks.'' Specifically, I want to talk about the inclusion of earmarks--a lot of them--about $5 billion worth in this particular package of bills.

The government-directed micromanagement of any large, complex economy never works. By ``never,'' I mean literally never. Never in the history of human beings has this worked or has it ended well except for a small handful who grow richer and more powerful every time government attempts it. Very often, it is undertaken with an eye toward a populous objective, one that is supposed to elevate the poor, but it, in the end, has quite the opposite effect. A reverse Robin Hood world then develops, one in which those who are already wealthy and already powerful become more so and everyone else suffers. It has been attempted time after time in this country and in other countries all over the world, in many different eras, and it literally never works.

It is like the game Mouse Trap. If you ever played Mouse Trap as a kid, you know the experience that I am talking about. In the game of Mouse Trap, you would set up this elaborate system of marbles, and they would go down a little tunnel and a little ditch, and they would turn a wheel and ring a bell at the end of it. The game never worked. Mouse Trap never works. Earmarks never work--neither does socialism, neither does the progressive nightmare that we have been living in for a long time--nursing it along--pretending that somehow, this time, it will turn out differently. It will not.

Our former colleague and dear friend of mine, the late Senator Tom Coburn from Oklahoma--a dedicated fiscal conservative and a fierce, stalwart opponent of earmarks--once said, ``Earmarks are the gateway drug to spending addiction.'' His words were prescient, and they remain as truthful today as ever.

Earmarks are, by their very nature, corrupting--corrupting of the process--perhaps not in a legally cognizable way, but they are corrupting, nonetheless, of the process. They allow for special interests to exert greater influence in our politics and steer Federal taxpayer dollars to pet projects in individual States or specific congressional districts often to benefit a particular business enterprise, nonprofit, or someone else. They fund projects that, as worthy or unworthy as they might be--and there is a broad spectrum of earmark beneficiaries that can be found at every point along a continuum of worthy in the abstract, or unworthy. But they have got certain things in common, and one of those is that they often shouldn't be funded by government at all. And for those that ought to be funded by the government, many of them shouldn't be funded by this government--this government, which is a government of limited, enumerated power, something that we fail most of the time to even acknowledge anymore, much less respect.

Remember, James Madison described, at the dawn of our Republic, as our Constitution had been proposed but not yet ratified--and during the ratification debates, he penned so many of the Federalist Papers. And in Federalist 45, he wrote that the powers of the Federal Government are ``few and defined'' and those reserved to the States are ``numerous and indefinite.''

The ``few and defined'' powers really are that. As much as we sometimes like to pretend otherwise, we are in charge of just a few basic responsibilities where we have exclusive domain within our system of government, where our power trumps State and local power. But those areas really are limited, you see, because our Founding Fathers understood a very simple truth, which is that the risk of corruption grows larger and the difficulty of overcoming corruption becomes more distant, more remote, more tenuous the higher the level of government you go. They understood that problems arising in a government are much more difficult to eradicate in a larger, more national government, and that is why they very carefully--almost religiously--reserved most of the power to be exercised at the State and local level.

But they carved out exceptions. What are those exceptions? Well, the most notable and obvious among them are national defense, weights and measures, trademarks, copyrights and patents, postal roads, regulating the interstate, and foreign trade or commerce. And there are a few others, but that is the gist of it. There is no general power in there. There is no power in there, for example, to say: Let's make sure we have good schools. Let's make sure everybody is happy. Let's make sure that a good idea gets funded.

No, those things don't exist in there. That is a figment of our imagination. For the first 150 years of our Republic when operating under the Constitution, we respected those limits and those boundaries. It started to change during the New Deal era in the 1930s where Congress and the executive branch and the judicial branch undertook a sort of collusive pattern of behavior to sideline principles that had fostered the development of the greatest civilization the world had ever known and ushered in one of the greatest, most prolonged eras of more or less continuous peacetime economic expansion.

And they just said: Oh, those rules that have worked here in the past that are still the law, were still the law in the 1930s, and remain the law today, we are going to set those aside. We are going to make them malleable. We are going to decide that they can mean whatever we want them to mean.

But, Mr. President, as Mark Twain is quoted as having said: If you name the tail of a dog a leg and you ask how many legs does the dog have, what is the answer? Well, it is still four legs. The tail of a dog is still a tail and is not a leg, even if you call it a leg.

We have called these things Federal powers, many of them since the 1930s, or at least looked the other way, with the Supreme Court also looking the other way since the 1930s, but it doesn't mean that these are appropriate activities for the Federal Government to engage in.

Now, what does this have to do with earmark spending? Everything. Because when we earmark spend, almost every time--not always, but almost every time--it is dealing with something that is at the far frontiers of what is even debatably connected to something that is debatably connected to an enumerated Federal power.

We have steered so far away from where we are supposed to be acting, we have forgotten why we are here. And as is the case when raising kids, especially when they get to be teenagers, you get into trouble when you stop doing the things that you are supposed to be doing. And when you start doing things that you are not supposed to be doing, you forget the things that you are supposed to be doing, and you don't do them very well.

We see that today, here, in this bill package right now, where we are being asked to jettison funding for a Department that includes, among other things, the enforcement of our immigration laws and the enforcement of our borders, something that has been severely compromised in the last few years and that President Trump is working hard to overcome. We are being asked to jettison that portion of the bill and replace it with a 2-week substitute, a 2-week temporary continuing resolution.

What does this have to do with earmarks? Everything. It has everything to do with it because, as we are not doing that, we are focusing on a whole bunch of stuff that we have no business doing, no business funding. And the way in which we are funding it is itself corrupting and corrosive of our process.

Any process that is designed to maintain sanity, fiscal responsibility, it is designed to maintain limited government with limited enumerated powers, we have thrown it all to the wind. The consequences have been disastrous. We are $38.5 trillion in debt, and we are

adding to that debt at a staggering rate, close to $2 trillion a year, with no end in sight. Now, I can already hear the apologists of earmarks, the earmark brigade we will call them, saying: Well, earmarks are just a tiny, tiny percentage of overall spending.

That is true. They are. The same way that when you look at a locomotive, something that might stretch, I don't know, a half mile or a mile, the engine car of the mile-long locomotive is a tiny, tiny piece of the train, but it is what is driving the train. That is what earmarks do. They drive excessive Federal spending; they facilitate $2 trillion annual deficits; and they drive us into this awful downward spiral that leads us to a very dark place.

Now, at a time like this when American families around the country are working hard and the comeback is still just getting started, Congress really does need to remember its role as the steward of tax dollars. And to be a good steward of tax dollars, it has got to recognize some limit around its authority, but it doesn't do that. Its earmarks facilitate our further drift away from that standard.

We should consider earmark spending in the context of our $38.5 trillion debt, but we are adding to it at a rate of nearly $2 trillion a year. And our debt itself is a percentage of the economy--and you have to remember, it is at an alltime high. It is not just that the nominal debt, that the number is higher than it has ever been. It is true. We have never had a $38.5 trillion debt. But adjusted by every conceivable measure, whether you look at it in inflation-adjusted dollars, whether you look at it as a percentage of the economy, it is at an alltime high.

Now, fortunately, President Trump and many Senate Republicans have worked hard in an effort to root out wasteful spending and decrease the likelihood of a debt crisis or inflation or both. Remember the excitement when, about a year ago, first--a little over a year ago, as we were preparing for the new administration and the new Senate Republican majority to kick in and the new House of Representatives to continue under Republican control, there was a lot of enthusiasm over it with President Trump and Elon Musk kick-starting the DOGE process? You saw every Republican in Congress, and really in both Chambers, champing at the bit to be part of the DOGE movement. It was cool. It was hip. It was happening. It was the energy that this town needed. Everybody was excited about it. Everybody wanted to be part of the DOGE process. And then all of a sudden, they lost interest in it. Within just a few months, it has faded. And that is really, really sad.

But fast-forward to now, and there is still a lot of good things that we could and should be doing. In fact, just days ago, President Trump announced his appointment of a new Department of Justice official who will focus specifically on efforts to root out the fraud and abuse of American taxpayer dollars. That is a good thing. That is a natural outgrowth of the DOGE effort. It is a natural outgrowth of President Trump's desire to make America great again. This is an important project, and I hope and expect that it will succeed.

Yet sometimes I think that, while we draw near to the concept, to the idea, to the suggestion of being more efficient, of being more careful as stewards of the people's hard-earned money, we draw near to these concepts with our lips, but we show through our actions that our hearts are far from it. Democrats are continuing to push for more spending, more earmarks, and more government. That is not the path to prosperity.

As I have said before, earmarks don't just promote reckless spending; they are reckless spending. The process itself, when in the hands of fallible, mortal human beings, is itself naturally corrupting. They naturally do lead to and contribute to but fundamentally are reckless spending.

Now, according to the Congressional Research Service, from 1944 to 2011, there was a 282-percent increase in earmarks in appropriations bills. So after the very successful red wave election of 2010, the election in which I was first elected to the U.S. Senate, both the Senate and the House Republican conferences simultaneously adopted earmark bans correctly recognizing the corrupting nature of earmarks and their growing contribution to an increasingly problematic and unsustainable fiscal picture for the Federal Government.

I remember that moment well. I had just been elected to the Senate. It was November of 2010. I had yet to be sworn in. That wouldn't happen until January of 2011. But I came back here for my new Member orientation and was permitted, as a newly elected Senator-elect, to participate in my first Senate Republican conference. And it was in that measure that I supported and advocated aggressively for the earmark ban that we adopted.

It was a great move. So successful and so popular, so backed by popular voter demand was this anti-earmark wave that even former President Obama, while occupying the White House at the time, agreed, agreed right then, he said--shortly after the November 2010 election, about the same time the Senate Republican conference, just down the Hall from here in the Capitol, adopted this earmark ban which, in my view, is still in place--he said:

I agree with those Republican and Democratic members of

Congress who have recently said that in these challenging

days (referring to rising deficits and debt levels) that we

cannot afford . . . earmarks.

He was absolutely right. And if he was right then, it follows--in fact, it follows a fortiori that it is even more true today that the same words that President Obama uttered then are even more applicable then--they were applicable then; they are more applicable now, way more applicable.

Our national debt is several multiples of what it was then, $38.5 trillion, adding to it at a rate of about $2 trillion a year. Now, in 2019, Senate Republicans made the earmark ban permanent that had previously been considered temporary, a pause, a moratorium. And we had this decades-long earmark moratorium.

During that moratorium, what happened? Did the sky fall? No, it didn't. It didn't fall. Were there dogs and cats living together in the streets? Book of Revelation stuff? Not at all. There was no Armageddon. Were there disastrous political consequences to the Republicans who had spearheaded that earmark ban? No, not at all. Republicans did not suffer massive electoral defeat.

In fact, within a few years, we captured the majority again in the U.S. Senate. So to my Republican colleagues, stop telling yourselves that earmarks are necessary, that they are indispensable either for electoral success or the survival of the American economy or the survival of your home States' economy. They are not. That simply is not true. That is a lie we tell ourselves. It is not true.

Unfortunately, however, after Democrats took back the White House with House and Senate majorities also under Democratic control in 2021, they brought back the earmark practice. And, sadly, many Senate Republicans decided to go along with it at that time. Let's just go along because they are doing it. We might as well not let them have all the fun. So some started to do that.

Now, this return in recent years, starting in 2021, to include billions of dollars' worth of earmarks in annual spending bills, this is a microcosm of Federal waste and Congress' refusal to properly act to stave off a fiscal crisis.

This is the kind of direct attack on the President's economic agenda that goes unnoticed because those who support it often do so quietly, sometimes with a whisper or a whimper.

I will not go quietly, nor should I, nor should any of us when we consider what we do to our children and our grandchildren, whether they are born or unborn. Whether their parents are alive yet or not, our posterity will suffer from the consequences of these.

But it is not just that. It is those of us who are alive today, those of us who are working hard just to provide for our families today who suffer because when we spend too much money, everything costs more money. As Milton Friedman used to say, the true rate of taxation has to be measured not just by the top marginal tax rate. You have to look at the rate of government spending as a percentage of the economy because, one way or another, that piper has got to be paid. One way or another, it comes out in the wash. One way or another, the people will pay for it. They pay for it in terms of higher prices on everything they buy-- every good, every service.

And, tragically, it is not the wealthy who bear this burden disproportionately. It is hard-working Americans, poor and middle-class Americans, those who work hard, pay their bills, pay their taxes and find that every dollar they earn buys a little bit less. We have seen more of that in the last few years than we have in a very long time.

Government Agencies, for their part, very often will try to hide the true impact of this, but they can't hide it for too long. They can conceal it. They can obscure it a little bit. But the American people know; they know what is happening. This is catching up to us.

Are earmarks the whole problem? No. Are they a small percentage of overall Federal spending? Yes, they are. Is discretionary spending much smaller than all mandatory spending? Yes. But this is all part of the same problem. And, again, it is earmark spending that drives the train. It is earmark spending that very often distracts us away from the things we are supposed to be doing and takes us down the direction of areas where the Federal Government probably shouldn't be acting in any event.

So let me ask this question: How are voters to trust Republicans in Congress to get spending in order and reduce our national budget deficits and eventually our debt if we don't have the discipline as a conference to cut even a few billion dollars in pork-barrel spending? How can we, as Republicans in Congress, in the House or the Senate, rightfully cancel wasteful foreign aid and subsidies to leftwing public radio but then simultaneously offset those things by greenlighting the enactment of several billion dollars' worth of wasteful earmarks?

Now, I will concede here everybody has a different definition of what is wasteful, what is good, what is bad. I will concede that a number of these probably go to worthy beneficiaries or at least good people intending, wanting to do good things for the American people. That doesn't mean that it is our money to spend. It doesn't mean that it is the appropriate role of the Federal Government to do that. It doesn't mean it is appropriate for any government to do that. And it doesn't mean that this process--the way we do it here--isn't terribly corrupting, with the tendency to drive up overall Federal spending.

To quote President Trump, ``For years, the radical left Democrats exploited the green-energy scam as an excuse to funnel many billions of dollars into their own massive slush funds'' and ``drastically drove up prices.''

That is what happens. That is what they do. Well, through certain earmarks, they quietly do the same, diverting the tax dollars of the American people to the kinds of projects that should never receive taxpayer money.

In total, the cost of earmarks this time around is around $5.2 billion. Yes, it is a small percentage of overall Federal spending. Yes, it is a small percentage even of the Federal spending in this particular package. But it is what is driving the train, and it is emblematic of the kind of problem that creates the much larger problem. While we are focused obsessively on doing these, we are not doing what we are supposed to be doing.

Speaking of emblematic, as we remove funding from the Department of Homeland Security, one of the few Departments that is pretty easy to fit within the enumerated powers of the Federal Government--why? Because the Federal Government is in charge of immigration laws, borders, and the enforcement of those laws governing immigration and nationality and that sort of thing. And yet that is what gets pulled out. We leave in there all the stuff that is tangentially related, at best, to enumerated Federal powers under the Constitution. Now, in total, yes, it is a small percentage, but it is what is driving the train.

Earmarks aside, perhaps the biggest problem with spending bills--with these spending bills, this package of spending bills that we will soon be considering--is that they simply spend too much money. Much of this stems from the fact that discretionary outlays spiked during COVID, and they never came back down to pre-COVID levels. In fact, total discretionary spending from fiscal year 2020 through fiscal year 2024 was $1 trillion higher than the Congressional Budget Office had projected it to be over that timeframe when they issued their 2019 budget baseline projections. That is the discretionary side.

Meanwhile, the mandatory side also exploded, so it got a lot worse. A lot of people are fond of saying: Well, it is not discretionary spending; it is mandatory spending. But they both went way, way up.

It is time to stop talking a big game about fiscal responsibility and to show voters that we measure up to the task. We cannot simply relent when Democrats want to tie the hands of this administration and saddle the American people with unsustainable debt.

So the question I pose to my colleagues who are OK with earmarks in their spending bills is this: Why are Senate Republicans supporting the effort to ignore our conference's still active, still intact earmark ban to partner with Democrats and reverse course on President Trump? You don't believe me? Well, this bill, as presently constituted, does among many, many other things the following: It funds hospitals and healthcare clinics that provide puberty blockers to children and perform abortions. It does that.

It sends money to a dance festival. This dance festival may be lovely. I am not really personally into dance festivals. Maybe some are. Those who like them, I hope they enjoy them. Dance festivals, I am sure, can be a great thing. That doesn't mean that the Federal Government should be funding it--or any government. I don't know why it is the job of any government that collects money from people, loosely speaking, at the point of a gun--because if you don't pay your taxes, eventually people with guns will come and issue a fine or haul you off if you refuse to pay--but we are funding it anyway.

It provides for million-dollar renovations at both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Let's think about that for a minute. That is one of the wealthiest cities not only in America but in the world. And let's take the opera, for example. The opera: It is a great thing. I love the arts. It is fantastic. This is not exactly an everyman hobby. Now, I am sure there are exceptions. But it has a well-earned reputation for being something that is favored by the elite, by very wealthy individuals, in one of America's wealthiest cities.

So why are we sending them a million dollars? The Metropolitan Opera, the last time I checked, has an endowment worth about $255 million. It has multiple employees earning in excess of $1 million a year. I believe it has real estate assets valued at around half a billion dollars. And yet hard-working Americans in Peoria, IL, and in Orem, UT, all over the country, people who probably don't visit New York very often, if ever, who may not be into the opera, they are all being asked to subsidize that, to pay a million dollars for elevator renovations not only at the Metropolitan Opera but also at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Why? Why is that our role?

But not only why is it our role; why is it the responsibility of a plumber from Montana who is just trying to feed his family, who is probably never going to attend that opera or the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Why are you sticking that person with the bill?

The spending package also allocates dollars for nonprofits; specifically, nonprofits providing aid and counseling and legal services to illegal aliens, to individuals whose sole uniting characteristic is that they are here inside the United States unlawfully. Why are we doing that when it is counter to what we are supposed to be doing, which is to discourage illegal immigration and to make possible bringing to justice those who break the laws--something that--oh, yeah, we are removing that part of the bill that would even do that because we are too busy making sure that we are funding the hobbies of the ultrawealthy in one of America's wealthiest cities that most Americans will never visit. This is reverse Robin Hood at its worst. This is taking money from the poor and giving it to the rich, and it is wrong.

The bill also contains earmarks funding a nonprofit organization called NICE. Now, don't let the name fool you. NICE is not so nice. NICE is the New Immigrant Community Empowerment to assist illegal aliens in getting jobs--jobs that ought to go to American citizens or at least individuals

who, if not citizens, are inside the United States legally and legally authorized to work in the United States of America.

The Federal Government, through taxpayers, should not be funding hospitals that give puberty blockers to children or nonprofit museums or leftwing labor activist organizations or leftwing physicians activist organizations or groups providing legal aid or subsidized housing specifically to illegal aliens. It shouldn't do that. It shouldn't do that ever, regardless of who is in charge, especially in a time when the House of Representatives is under Republican control, when the Senate is under Republican control, and the White House is occupied by a Republican President. It shouldn't do it ever but especially not when Republicans are in charge of all three levers of the two political branches: the legislative and the executive.

Senate Republicans especially should not be facilitating this abuse of power and at the hard-earned money of the American people, many of whom work months out of every year just to pay their Federal taxes only to find that every dollar they have left buys less because we are spending too much money.

We shouldn't be facilitating this abuse of power and violating pledges that President Trump and that we ourselves, as Senate Republicans, have made on the campaign trail to root out and end wasteful, woke spending across the Federal Government.

Even in a Republican-controlled Congress, Democrats are still able to effectuate and fund a radical agenda that the American people opposed when they elected us to this majority and that we promised we wouldn't perpetuate. And yet here we are. It is tragic.

Congress does not need to and should not use earmarks as sweeteners, for lack of a better word, to make the appropriations process work. We cannot continue appropriations bills that perpetuate excess spending, especially when those same things are pushing policies that inevitably, invariably, deliberately hobble the efforts of this administration.

This is like putting a humidifier and a dehumidifier in the same room and just letting them fight it out when you promised only the dehumidifier would be there.

And at a minimum we should build on the successful rescissions bill initiated through the DOGE process and carried forward throughout the last year, the successful rescissions bill that, by exerting some basic fiscal discipline to enforce our conference rules and put an end to earmarks--or rather than just put an end to it, resume the end that we put in place 15 years ago, heal the breach that has now been there for about 5 years, and honor what is still our conference position.

Only then will we be able, I believe, to tackle the self-inflicted economic wounds that cloud the bright skies of opportunity before us.

As President Trump said in his end-of-year speech, just a few weeks ago, ``we're poised for an economic boom the likes of which the world has never seen.''

I believe him, and he is doing a lot of things that are helping us get there. The least we can do is not undercut him. And to achieve that potential, we the Congress, we the Senate, and we the Senate Republican conference in the majority must act.

Earmarks aren't the way. They are the wrong way. Earmarks aren't the solution. They are the problem. We need to end them.

In connection with this package of bills, I have put forward an amendment to strip them from this bill, and I humbly, with all the conviction I am capable of communicating, implore my colleagues to support the amendment.

Mr. President, the American people understand to varying degrees but have a general understanding of the fact that the work we do here in the Senate is a combination of things.

Some of the things that we address are controversial. Some of them make the daily or evening news or the cover of the newspaper the next day. Those tend to be the things that are more controversial, things on which there might be sharp disagreements, sometimes sharply divided down partisan lines, reflected based on where one's desk sits in relation to the center aisle of this Chamber.

Other times, there might be controversy, but the controversy doesn't cut cleanly across party lines. We might have some Republicans and some Democrats on one side or the other.

In many instances--maybe not enough but, mercifully, there are many instances--there is not only not much controversy but no controversy at all.

There is a significant amount of legislation that passes through this Chamber every single year unanimously, without a single ``no'' vote. Some of this, to be sure, might recognize the naming of a post office or it might recognize--I don't know--``National Sofa Care Month,'' if there is such a thing. Others deal with discrete, local issues--issues that, while important to a select few people who live around, for example, a particular piece of land owned by the Federal Government and might be affected by the land management policy associated with that parcel, are very important to that local population but might be completely unknown not only to people on the other side of the country but even to people in other parts of that same State.

There is a fair amount of legislation that moves through the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources--a committee that I currently chair--that fits into each of these categories: controversial bills where there is a sharp Republican-Democratic divide; bills that have some controversy that cut across party lines; and, yes, mercifully, this other category of noncontroversial votes without a single substantive objection.

The American people understand that there will be opposition to a lot of pieces of legislation, but they also, justifiably, expect us to consider and pass bills on their merits. As to this category of bills that are important to some, unknown to most, and controversial to no one, well, they expect us to get those passed in a timely fashion.

I am trying to do this quickly, expeditiously, and to do it in the right way.

Now, I tried doing it the right way--the same way I am going to try today--back in May, on the 22nd of May. I tried to do it the right way again on July 29. I tried doing it the right way again, 2 weeks ago. This will be my fourth attempt to try to pass a small handful of extremely noncontroversial bills that already passed this Chamber unanimously, without a single ``no'' vote in the last Congress, at the end of last year, and that have moved forward from the Energy and Natural Resources Committee--again, without opposition from either side of the aisle, from any Senator--earlier this year.

Each of these times, I have received an objection from the Democratic side of the aisle. At no point have I heard a single substantive objection to any of these bills in this category that I have tried to pass through this procedure--a procedure which is well-worn and which exists for exactly this circumstance. You know, across multiple committees--certainly within the Energy and Natural Resources Committee--there is a lot of legislation that falls into that category.

We are told repeatedly that there are simply too many bills for the Senate to consider individually. This is often the case. And it is often the case, in particular, that for a bill that has no opposition, for a bill that is very important to a population of people within a particular State as to a discrete issue--it might be important or interesting to literally no one else in any other State or in other parts of the same State--we are told that these bloated bills that sometimes get combined, which are multiple pieces of legislation, sometimes amounting to thousands of pages at a time, can become a necessary evil to accommodate all of the small lands bills important to our States.

I am here to tell you that this is simply not the case. It certainly need not be the case here, and it isn't.

Now, had we moved these bills each time I have been on the floor this year, we certainly would have already been able to make significant progress in clearing the backlog, so that we could deal with this problem that many people cite as a reason we would need a massive, all- or-nothing, bloated, sewn-together lands package--take it or leave it, all or nothing.

If we really need the bills passed, why can't we start, at least, with the low-hanging fruit?

I have no delusions that this makes everything easy. It certainly doesn't, as there is a lot of this process that can be difficult. But we ought to start with the bills that are noncontroversial,

that have yet to receive a single substantive objection on their merits, and that are things that we all agree on.

Why can't we move the bills that have already passed unanimously, that have already been vetted in committee this year and last year, and that passed on the Senate floor without a single ``no'' vote last year?

Why come down here and object, over and over again, to bills that are noncontroversial?

Well, sometimes this is the muscle memory that can start to evolve, that can start to take hold within this body. But it need not be this way; it ought not be this way, as it doesn't lead to good decisions. If this is how we treat the things that are noncontroversial, it is going to make the things where there is some debate, some opposition, some dissent more difficult and, as to the stuff that is sharply partisan, impossible.

If you have a bill that you know can't pass on its own, well then, what do you do?

Well, perhaps what you want to do is pair it with a bunch of other bills that are themselves noncontroversial, hoping that it won't get noticed or hoping that there will be enough other Senators who will say: I guess we have to take it or leave it; so let's let it all pass.

They might say: Are you really going to sink all of this important work just for one section of this much larger bill that you disagree with?

Well, look, taken to its logical conclusion and repeated, over and over again, and applied even to noncontroversial bills, this ends up being sort of extortive in its effect, and it doesn't produce a good outcome--not for people of either party, not for people of either legislative Chamber, and, certainly, not for the American people.

Just yesterday, we were able to do some things on the floor the right way. Senator Sullivan came to the floor and passed his bill to extend the deadline for Alaska Native Vietnam-era vets to claim the land allotments that they earned through their service. This was only after Democrats--including my friend and colleague the distinguished senior Senator from New Mexico, Senator Heinrich--had objected to it twice. But his bill--Senator Sullivan's legislation that I just mentioned--is now headed to the President's desk to be signed into law. Now, there is no reason that that success that we tasted, just yesterday afternoon, can't continue here with similarly situated, similarly noncontroversial, unanimously passed bills.

So, again, I have got four bills that I will be asking unanimous consent to pass here today. They include S. 1084, which is the North Dakota Trust Lands Completion Act of 2025. This bill, sponsored by Senator Hoeven, passed last year with unanimous support and would authorize equal value exchanges to enable the State of North Dakota to manage its own State lands.

S. 1142 is the Scarper Ridge Golden Gate National Recreation Area Boundary Adjustment Act. This bill, sponsored by Senator Padilla, passed last year and would make a minor boundary adjustment to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. It is entirely noncontroversial.

S. 1016 is the Vicksburg National Military Park Boundary Modification Act. This bill, sponsored by Senator Wicker, is a minor but important boundary adjustment to the park, and it passed last year with unanimous support.

S. 603, sponsored by Senator Kaine, designates the George C. Marshall House in Virginia as an affiliated area within the National Park System. It is simply allowing them to be affiliated with the National Park Service. This bill also passed with unanimous support.

What do these bills have in common? Well, they are bipartisan. They all passed the body unanimously, without a single ``no'' vote in the last Congress. I have heard zero substantive objections on the merits to any single one of these bills.

I stand ready to work with any Member--Republican or Democrat--to move their bills off the floor, especially with regard to these noncontroversial bills.

We can get this done. We can work through this broken process. It need not be broken, especially as to this category of bills. This is the easy stuff. Let's not make the easy stuff hard, lest we incur the risk of making the harder stuff impossible.

So to that end, Mr. President, as if in legislative session and notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources be discharged and that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of the following bills en bloc; further, that the bills, as amended, if amended, where applicable, be considered read a third time and passed en bloc and that motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table, all en bloc: S. 1084, North Dakota Trust Lands Completion Act of 2025 from Senator Hoeven; S. 1142, the Scarper Ridge Golden Gate National Recreation Area Boundary Adjustment Act from Senator Padilla; S. 1016, the Vicksburg National Military Park Boundary Modification Act with a substitute amendment from Senator Wicker; and S. 603, to designate the General George C. Marshall House in the Commonwealth of Virginia from Senator King.

Mr. President, I appreciate my friend and colleague, the distinguished Senator from New Mexico, who has a genuine concern. It is a worthy concern, and it is a concern that I share in the sense that I want to make sure that both Democrats and Republicans serving in this body on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, when they submit these bills--particularly bills in this category that I described that have passed unanimously in this body--be given ample opportunity for consideration and passage over in the House of Representatives.

He is understandably concerned about the possibility of Republican and Democratic bills being sent over together, only to discover after the fact, that the Democratic bills would languish. I understand that concern. I am deeply sympathetic to it.

And it is because I share that concern--and not in spite of it--that I believe this is the way we ought to do things. This is the way we do things elsewhere in the Senate where we have got noncontroversial legislation. Let's move them forward. Now, we have moved them forward. You have seen pairings here; Democratic bills brought to the floor, not stitched together surgically in one legislative package but paper- clipped together in one stack so that we are presenting them for unanimous consent passage at the same time but not as part of the same legislation.

Why do we do this rather than the other way?

Understanding the legitimacy of his concerns, we want to make sure that bills in this category, in particular, receive fair consideration regardless of whether there is a Democrat or Republican sponsor of the bill.

No. 1, our House counterpart committee and others within the House of Representatives have told us that not only is this their preference-- that they would rather have them paper-clipped and not stitched together as one bill but sent over as separate bills--they

said this will actually expedite, facilitate their ability to get them passed, whether they are introduced by Republicans or Democrats in the House or in the Senate.

Not always, by the way, is a Democrat bill here a Democrat bill on the other side of the Capitol. Sometimes it switches. But regardless, even for the bills that are introduced by a Democrat here and a Democrat there, these bills are considered--and we have been told over and over again by those with responsibility over this, they have got a better chance of passing separately than they would if we start stitching them together.

In their view, as they have told me repeatedly, it will hinder--not expedite or facilitate--their chances of being passed if we surgically stitch them together in one bill.

There are a number of reasons for this, including the fact that the laws of gravity don't always operate the same way here as they do on the other side of the Capitol. Sometimes a bill that can move through over here without a single objection might draw some opposition on the other side of the Capitol for reasons that can be difficult to predict.

In any event, there is a great safeguard in all of this in the way the House of Representatives passes this--and I think this is inherent in why it is that they want them as separate bills that can be paper- clipped together for purposes of getting it passed by unanimous consent over here--over there.

When they do it over there, they use a procedure in the House known as suspension of the rules. Under suspension of the rules, you have got to have 290 votes to pass it rather than a simple majority of 218 votes. That feature ends up replicating, to a significant degree, the effect of the cloture standard over here such that it has got to be bipartisan. So they can't afford to--and therefore don't on bills like this--favor Republican bills over Democrat bills.

Now, my friend and colleague the distinguished Senator from New Mexico noted a moment ago that his concerns are already materializing and that they are neglecting Democrat bills in the House while preferencing Republican bills.

I don't see this. In fact, to the contrary. Within the last week, the House of Representatives has passed multiple bills--I believe it was three or four bills--introduced by Democrats; Democrat bills run through the suspension of the rules calendar passed this week.

They are not depreferencing them. And from what I have heard from multiple credible sources on the other side of the Capitol, this is because of the way the suspension of the rules practice works over there. They don't, in part, because they can't get these passed if they preference Republican bills and depreference Democrat bills in this respect.

Look, at the end of the day, we have to remember that a lot of what this Chamber does operates by means of unanimous consent, certainly in scheduling votes, scheduling just about anything. Heck, scheduling what time we are going to go to lunch or adjourn for the evening until the next day requires unanimous consent.

But a lot of legislation we pass gets done that way, too, and thank Heaven above that it can. If we can't do the easy stuff this way, the harder stuff becomes much more difficult. And the really tough stuff, the stuff that still needs to get done--things like permitting reform, for example, where on both sides of the aisle you have strong opinions, you have a strong desire overall to see that permitting reform gets accomplished, you have somewhat differing ideas on what must be in there and what must not be included--things like that that are very important to the public but that are by no means noncontroversial become far more difficult to impossible.

Let's get the easy stuff done. We did it yesterday afternoon. We can do it again. I will be back as I am determined to push these bills forward, Republican and Democrat. And if we tie them together surgically in one bill, it will impair their passage, Republican and Democratic alike. We don't need to do that here. We ought not. This is unfortunate, but I will be back soon.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table and the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action for the Isaacman nomination and any nominations confirmed during Wednesday's session of the Senate.