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Floor Speech
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Mr. JOHNSON. Mr. President, I would just like to offer a few words of rebuttal for the Democratic leader.
He talked about high oil prices. He didn't mention the fact that when President Biden was in office and Democrats were in charge, in June of 2022, the national average gas price reached almost $5 a gallon. That same month, inflation was 9.1 percent, a 40-year high.
That wasn't because President Biden was having to do something hard, to take care of the menace that Iran was. President Biden was coddling Iran, pumping billions of dollars into their economy, into their military, into their proxies.
Gasoline was $5 a gallon because of their war on fossil fuels, because of Democrat policies. So I need to correct the record there.
The second point I want to make is, I heard the Democrat leader say that Democrats are--I think this is what he said--are in favor of commonsense voter ID. Well, if that is the case, I am sure we would be happy to work with them to deliver that, because 80 percent of the American people agree with the picture ID to vote--80 percent. It is the Democrats who refuse to put any kind of controls to ensure the security of our elections.
But I think he completely mischaracterized what the Senator from Utah's bill, the SAVE America Act, actually does. It is not going to make it harder to vote. It is going to make it harder to cheat, because Americans do not want their legitimate vote canceled by a fraudulent one.
But we are going to actually--we have got this bill on the floor. We are going to be debating it. The way the Senate debates things is we offer amendments. Republicans are going to be offering amendments to add to it things, again, the American people support with 60, 70, 80 percent majorities.
But if Democrats actually have a constructive approach to a commonsense idea that 80 percent of Americans would agree with, talk to us. My guess is Senator Lee would be happy to clarify the legislation to prove the fact that we are not going to make it harder to vote; we are just going to make it more difficult to cheat.
Again, this ought to be, from my standpoint, a very instructive-- hopefully, a very productive--debate over the next number of days, maybe number of weeks. This is important.
In 2016, Democrats were the ones that said it wasn't a legitimate election when Donald Trump first got elected. Four years later, the tables were turned. All of a sudden, the other half of America said it was not a legitimate election. This is an unsustainable state of affairs.
The only way to cure it is for commonsense election controls to make sure that we have the integrity so that, no matter who wins the election, both sides agree that that is a legitimate result. That is what we are trying to achieve as Republicans.
Again, we don't want to see somebody's legitimate vote canceled by a fraudulent one.
I think the fact that Democrats are opposed to virtually any-- probably all--election integrity measures just proves they want to make it easy to cheat.
I will throw in one final comment. The Carter-Baker Commission--I would call it a completely nonpartisan Commission--looked at our election system and tried to identify, you know, how can we make it as secure as possible. The one area of our elections they thought was the greatest opportunity for fraud was absentee mail-in balloting.
So in light of that fact, what did Democrats do during COVID? They took advantage of that situation and literally doubled the number of absentee ballots while--certainly in my State, the State of Wisconsin, there were all kinds of irregularities in terms of ballots being cured by election clerks, which is not lawful, balloting in the park, improper assisting of seniors in nursing homes.
There were all kinds of irregularities that in the end were never adjudicated. Like some of the court cases in the 2020 election, they were just thrown out of court, dismissed, because, let's face it, our judicial system really doesn't want to get involved in elections. I don't fault them for that, but it is just the reality of the situation.
So, again, what this debate is about is making sure that every American has the confidence that their legitimate vote will not be canceled by a fraudulent one. That is what Republicans want to do. We want to make it easy to vote but almost impossible to cheat.
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