Save America Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. LEE. 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.

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