Terminating the National Emergency Declared to Impose Global Tariffs

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, our Constitution starts out with the three words ``We the People,'' and they are written in supersize font to tell you that that is what the core of our democracy is all about-- or, as Lincoln so well summarized, government of, by, and for the people.

There are several things essential to make this happen: the freedom of speech, for one; the freedom of assembly, for another. But perhaps nothing encapsulates the opportunity of a citizen to participate in the direction of their own country more than the ballot box, more than the right and opportunity to vote.

Yet that sacred opportunity at the heart of our Constitution is under assault because there seems to be one party that has decided it is about suppressing citizens' rights rather than empowering and honoring citizens' opportunity to participate in our government. And they have this bill that is all about voter suppression.

Well, we have gone through some serious voter suppression. Some of it was written into our original Constitution. Despite the lofty goals, we didn't allow people of color to vote; we didn't allow women to vote; we didn't allow Native Americans to vote; we didn't allow the enslaved to vote. But we have worked toward that lofty vision that we knew was right.

We remedied slavery, ending it in 1865 with the 13th Amendment. We passed the 15th Amendment to ensure the right to vote shall not be denied by race or color or previous servitude. And then, some 50 years later--it took 50 additional years before the right to vote was guaranteed to women in the United States of America.

After the Civil War, reconstruction collapsed in about 1877. There was kind of an evil deal that was worked out all over the election of Rutherford Hayes. And that ended reconstruction; and, quickly, a series of measures were passed by States to suppress the opportunity of Black Americans to vote in the South. These included poll taxes; they included literacy tests; they included civics exams--rigged so that only White Americans could pass. But we remedied that situation. We took it on. It took a long time, unfortunately.

In the 1960s, Members of this Chamber and Members of the Chamber down the hall said we are ready to end that discrimination that we knew all along was wrong, those barriers erected for citizens to vote.

But now we have one party, the Republican Party, which was founded on the vision of ending slavery, that wants to suppress the vote of Americans once again. That is incredible. But we are going to stop that bill.

My own State has pioneered the ability to vote by mail, and that provision has spread across the country to States like Utah, a red State. Blue States, red States are saying this makes sense because it ends the corruption on election day where officials stop people from voting by relocating the voting booths to a new location, by putting equipment in there that malfunctions, by understaffing it, by putting out false information about where the voting will be held.

Vote-by-mail ended all of that corruption on election day, utilized so often to stop people from voting who lived in the inner city, who lived in poorer communities, who lived in communities of color--a modern-day version of the suppression that followed the collapse of reconstruction. We stopped it, and blue and red States have adopted those reforms.

But the SAVE Act is about going the other direction. What a name--the SAVE Act--as if it is saving something important as opposed to destroying the opportunity to vote.

So we will absolutely not let our colleagues across the aisle take us backwards to voter suppression.

Under the SAVE Act rules, my mother would likely not have been able to vote. The most common documents to prove citizenship are a birth certificate or a passport. And when my mother married my father, she changed her last name from Collins to Merkley. My mother never had a passport. She couldn't have used a passport. Her name was different than that on her birth certificate. Betty Lou Collins became Betty Lou Merkley. And Republicans want to stop women across the country from voting once again because their name doesn't match their birth certificate. That is pretty extraordinary.

More than half of Americans today who don't have a passport--my mother would have been in that category. She wouldn't have been able to register to vote.

Let's not go backward into the realm of voter suppression. Let's go forward into full voter empowerment. If you believe in this Constitution, then honor it; don't put it in the wood chipper.

Folks today are able to register in a variety of ways. Some say: Well, isn't this opening the possibility that noncitizens are voting? The answer is no. That is not happening.

The Secretary of State of Georgia, in 2022, led a massive examination of the history of voting in Georgia, and the Secretary of State says he could not find a single noncitizen that had cast a ballot in Georgia in 25 years. So don't tell me that your so-called reform is about integrity at the ballot place. We know what it is about. It is about manipulating the vote on election day to stop people from voting, and we are not going to let that happen.

In another case, the Brennan Center examined, in 2016, the behavior of 23 million voters, and they found it was roughly equal to the risk of being struck by lightning that a noncitizen would vote. And we know that in some cases where those have happened--I mean, it is so rare--it has happened because the bureaucracy screwed up and sent them a ballot when they weren't supposed to.

So let's be clear. Our journey toward the vision of citizen empowerment in voting has been imperfect. It has been long. It has been slow. It has seen setbacks like after the collapse of reconstruction. But we have worked steadily toward that vision, that ideal that every citizen should have that full opportunity to participate in the direction of their Nation.

So should the SAVE Act ever be brought to this floor, which itself would be a massive corruption of our responsibility as U.S. Senators, I am voting hell no, and everyone else should as well.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source