-9999

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. MURPHY. Senator Murphy for up to 15 minutes; Senator Cornyn for up to 15 minutes; and Senator Coons for up to 3 minutes.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to talk about a piece of legislation that was introduced yesterday by 16 bipartisan Senators: the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act.

I am proud of the effort between Republicans and Democrats to put aside our differences on other issues and to be able to put before this body a proposal that will assure that the votes that are cast all across this country for President in 2024 result in the winner of that election sitting in the Oval Office.

And I come to the floor today to underscore for my colleagues why this piece of legislation is so vitally necessary.

All across the country, we are seeing an epidemic of candidates being nominated for Governor, for secretary of state, for Congress, who don't believe Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

They instead believe these wild conspiracy theories about voting machines that magically switched votes from one candidate to another, Sharpies that voted for Joe Biden illegally. All of it has been debunked, but the conspiracy theories and the support for this notion that Donald Trump actually won the election, according to the rules of the electoral college in 2020, continue to spread.

The Republican nominee for Governor in Pennsylvania, who appoints the State's chief election official, was right here at the Capitol, yards away from this Chamber on January 6, as individuals were storming the building trying to do harm to us. He took part in high-level meetings after the 2020 election, intended to overturn Biden's win in Pennsylvania.

He is perhaps mere months away from being the next Governor and chief elections officer of that State. Across the country, former President Trump is organizing what he calls an America First Secretary of State Coalition, and he is pretty unapologetic about what the design is. It is to install election officers all across the country whose chief loyalty is to Donald Trump, not the vote.

His endorsed candidate in Arizona, for instance, called for Biden's win in Arizona to be thrown out and for the Republican State legislature to appoint its own electors instead.

In Nevada, the endorsed Republican candidate for secretary of state, another Trump loyalist, says if he was in office in 2020, he would not have certified Joe Biden's win, leading to an immediate constitutional crisis.

What is happening all across the country right now is a complete, total rejection of democracy by Trump supporters and his endorsed candidates.

Now, they aren't representative of the entire Republican Party, but, unfortunately, they are winning primaries all across the country, and they are winning elections all across the country.

And these Trump loyalists, they are not interested in the winner of an election becoming President if that winner isn't Donald Trump. They effectively want Donald Trump installed as a monarch, and they are willing to just throw out democracy if that is what is necessary to keep their leader in power.

And as I mentioned, this isn't some fringe phenomenon any longer. I think we have a lot of Republicans in the Senate and the House who see this danger coming and want to take steps to prevent it. That is why we are introducing this legislation, but there are over 100 winners of Republican primaries for Congress and statewide office this year who believe--who have stated this belief publicly that the 2020 election was stolen and that Donald Trump should still be President.

There is just a very well-developed and well-organized movement, where Trump supporters are learning from his inability to overturn the election in 2020, and they are galvanizing themselves to leave nothing to chance in 2024.

The operation to install Trump in the White House in 2025, if he runs, will be more sophisticated and better organized than 2020. The threat that 2024 will be the last year of American democracy is real.

I know that sounds like hyperbole, but we came really close to losing our democracy in 2020. And if a President is installed in the White House who did not actually win the election, then I don't know how you claim that this experiment for 250 years is still ongoing.

So we need to act, as a body, across the aisle. Those of us who believe that our loyalty to country is more important than our loyalty to party need to act to make it as hard as possible for a group of traitors to install as President the loser of the 2024 Presidential election.

And so toward that end, we have introduced a piece of legislation that will seek to reform the way in which electors are sent to Congress and the way in which we count those electors to put up as many barriers as we can to these efforts to install the loser of the 2024 election as President of the United States.

So I am grateful to Senator Collins and Senator Manchin for leading this process. I am grateful to be a part of it, along with Senators Portman, Sinema, Romney, Shaheen, Murkowski, Warner, Tillis, Capito, Cardin, Young, Coons, Sasse, and Graham.

And so let me tell you, in just a few minutes, what the most important elements--let me just tell you about some of the key elements of the Electoral Count Reform Act. It engages to make the selection and counting of fraudulent electors harder by both addressing efforts by Congress to overturn valid State results but also to make it harder for States to submit to Congress invalid State results.

Now, on January 6 of last year, we saw a handful of our colleagues attempt to throw out the valid elector slates from States like Pennsylvania and Arizona. And, luckily, in the end, those efforts only got a handful of votes here in the Senate, but the majority of Republicans voted to throw out those slates in the House of Representatives, which just tells you how mainstream these views have become.

And so, in two important ways, we make that attempt by Congress to throw out valid results from a State a little bit, but substantially, harder. Under our current law, it only takes one single Senator in order to throw this entire Senate into a debate over whether or not we should count or throw out certain electors.

In the end, there were, I think, 12 Republican Senators who suggested we should throw out ballots, but really all that was needed was 1. So what we do is we increase that threshold from 1 Senator to 20 percent of Senators, from 1 House Member to 20 percent of House Members to begin that debate. Ultimately, you still need a majority of the House and the Senate to throw out an elector slate, but you can't even begin that debate now without having 20 percent of each body. That is a substantial and important change.

Second, we clarify the role of the Vice President. Now, some would argue that this isn't necessary; that the Vice President's role in this process is ceremonial, but that is not what Donald Trump thought. Donald Trump and his cadre of fringe lawyers believed, by reading a statute in a particular way, that Mike Pence had the ability by himself to refuse to count certain slates of electors.

Now, that is not how the 1887 Act reads, but just to be absolutely clear, our reform act clarifies the law to make 100 percent clear that the Vice President's role is just ceremonial.

And then, as I said, we also take steps to make it harder for States to send fraudulent results to Congress because that is the primary threat in 2024. I still think that there are the votes in the Senate, no matter what the elections look like in 2024, for the Senate to make sure that we don't throw out valid results that are sent to the Congress.

The bigger threat is that one candidate wins in a State like Arizona or--depending on what happens in the gubernatorial election in Pennsylvania--Pennsylvania and instead that State decides to send electors for the losing candidate to Congress, making some vague, broad claims of fraud that they can't substantiate.

So we make that exercise in fraud less likely through a number of means. First, there is a really ambiguous provision in the 1887 law which President Trump argued in the courts allowed for State legislatures to appoint their own electors if they judged that the election was incomplete. Now, what that was initially intended to mean was if an election didn't happen because of a natural disaster, but Trump's lawyers thought that that meant that these claims of fraud could satisfy that incomplete criteria.

Well, we removed that ambiguity in this underlying piece of legislation. No longer will anybody be able to claim that State legislatures can just step in after the fact and appoint different electors.

Second, we have a clear prohibition that State legislatures can't change the rules of how electors are chosen after the election itself. Now, it is up to State legislatures as to how they appoint electors.

Every State right now appoints them based upon who won the popular vote in their State, but the Constitution does give that power to the State legislature. It does not give them the power to change that process after the voters have cast their vote. We make that clear in this piece of legislation.

And then, most importantly, we clarify the process by which campaigns and candidates can contest a fraudulent certification or a fraudulent appointment of electors.

As we saw in the 2000 election, there is overlapping contesting jurisdictions between States and the Federal court system. It often takes very--a very long time for those processes to play out and unwind. We set up in this bill a new expedited process of review by a three-judge panel. We limit the cases that can be brought to that panel by the campaigns themselves, just to make sure we aren't incentivizing spurious litigation.

But that new process allows the candidates and the campaigns, if they believe that the laws of the State have not been upheld in allowing the majority winner of that State to dictate what electors get sent to Washington, to make that claim before a three-judge panel in an expedited fashion, to have that case go up to the Supreme Court in an expedited manner as well.

Clarifying the way in which we solve for these contests, if they arise over a valid slate of electors and an invalid slate of electors is an important reform in this bill.

Listen, what we have built over the last 250 years in the United States of America, it really is a miracle, and we should never forget how much of an anomaly American democracy is when you look at the broad scope of the governments under which people have lived.

This idea that citizens, not dictators or Kings or plutocrats, get to decide who leads a nation--250 years later, it is still a revolutionary idea.

And I remind my constituents all the time that democracy is really unnatural, right? There are not a lot of other things that are important to us in our lives that we run through democratic vote. Our workplaces are really important places, but we don't run our workplace through democratic vote. The boss--the CEO--makes the decisions there.

We love our sports teams, right? We follow them. We live and die for them. But the decisions on those teams--they are not made by democratic vote. There is a coach, a general manager who makes the decisions. I love my kids, but they don't get an equal vote in the decisions of my household with my wife and me. Lots of things that are important to us in our lives don't run by democratic vote. We are very comfortable, in fact, with hierarchal systems, with one person or a handful of people making decisions for us, but we have reserved this idea of democracy for the decisions that are made that govern our community, our town, our State, or our Nation.

We need to remember that over the course of world history, almost no one has lived in a democratic civilization. Why? Because it is natural for human beings to want their chosen leader to be in charge, their preferred leader to be in charge, no matter what everybody else in the community believes. It is also natural for leaders, once they have tasted power, to want to cling to that power and refuse to give it up, no matter the wishes of their citizenry.

So we need to be constantly vigilant to protect this experiment. In the grand sweep of world history, that is what it is--a revolutionary experiment. We need to recognize the moments when the threats to that experiment are new and novel and more grave than normal and be nimble enough to respond.

So I would argue that this is one of those moments, and I am so grateful to the group of bipartisan Senators who have worked so hard to introduce this legislation.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source