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Floor Speech

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Ms. SLOTKIN. That is why we should immediately, today, fully fund TSA. If you care about paying TSA, let's pay TSA today.

If we want to actually pay TSA, let's do it right now. My colleague from Ohio, we both know what it is like to go back and forth to the Midwest every single week. Want to fund TSA? Want to have humanity for the people who are securing us? Let's fully fund them today.

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Ms. SLOTKIN. Will the Senator yield?

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Ms. SLOTKIN. It is not hard to notice that, right now, our country is going through a pretty fundamental conversation about the role of ICE and law enforcement in our city streets. We know that it is a cultural conversation in the United States of America because the previous head--the previous Secretary--of Homeland Security got fired because of the disaster that went on in Minneapolis.

I sat, as you did, in the hearing with Markwayne Mullin yesterday because we need a new Secretary of Homeland Security. Every American in the world, Democrat and Republican, understands that is because ICE so deeply contradicted American values in our American cities.

So we are having a full-on cultural conversation about the role of law enforcement in our streets.

In the meantime, you and I can agree every day of the week on the role of Border Patrol; CBP; FEMA, which we desperately need; the Coast Guard, which no one has more Coast Guard, pretty much, than Michigan. So I am ready to fund those things now, but I don't think we can ignore the fact that ICE is, right now, an unsettled issue in the United States of America.

We are not settled. People are negotiating because we are not settled. And even this week, the President of the United States sent a letter down here to talk about the reforms he acknowledges we need in some form or fashion.

Now, some of those reforms, to me, are basic and don't go far enough--like we won't deport American citizens. But even the President acknowledges we have a problem with ICE. So let's excise that one part that we are having an American conversation on and then fully fund the other stuff here and now today. That is what I am proposing.

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Ms. SLOTKIN. Of course.

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Ms. SLOTKIN. Will you yield?

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Ms. SLOTKIN. I am proposing today just the UC on TSA, but my colleagues, one after another, have proposed funding the Coast Guard, Border Patrol, FEMA. So whichever way we want to do the package-- individually or all but ICE--I am here for it.

I will do you one better on your proposal. I 100 percent agree.

When I first came to the Congress in 2019, we were in a government shutdown, in the first Trump administration, right? President Trump had a shutdown. That is how I came to the Congress. My very first bill as a Congressperson--bipartisan, by the way; the Problem Solvers Caucus; a bunch of us did it--was that if the government isn't fully funded, then Congresspeople, A, do not get paid, and B--I will go one further--are not allowed to have government pay for their travel back home, meaning they have to sit their butts down in Washington and negotiate and get it done then and there, without taking taxpayer dollars to go back home. So whether you want to add a $500 fee, whatever it is--this body is for appropriating money, so I am here for whatever you want to propose.

But I think you have to acknowledge and even the President acknowledges at this point that the American public--Democrat, Independent, and Republican--does not like American citizens being killed in our streets. They do not like going into a human being's home without a judicial warrant. They don't like children being taken and tear-gassed and caught in the crossfire; non-well-trained officers pulling people out of cars and getting into dangerous situations; people being targeted.

You should hate this. When you are walking into Target, they had ICE officers pulling people aside because they looked like they were immigrants and checking their papers. Do you know what that does to a Jew? Do you know what that means, to just check people's papers because of how they look? You should hate that.

So for me, whether we agree or disagree--and I would hope we would agree on the use of force in America--set that aside. Fund everything else today, now, here. Penalize Members of the Senate who want to go home and ignore the problem--I am with you on that.

But you are holding all of those Agencies hostage because of ICE. You are defending them and not allowing them to get their paychecks. You are holding them back from those three paychecks, not Democrats. We are here ready to pay. You are so protective of ICE, so protective of this President that you will not fund the other parts of DHS, and that is our homeland security. I know about that. That is my entire life. You know. You care about that. I know you do, Senator.

So, please, just excise the thing we are not agreeing on, fund the rest of it, let's get on with it, and understand that the American public has made their voice clear on this issue.

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Ms. SLOTKIN. I am suggesting that we get everybody in a room on the ICE issue. Lock them in a room here in the Capitol--our negotiators. I need the President to send his envoy so we can actually make some decisions. It has been hard to negotiate with Senate Republicans on this issue because they need the blessing of the White House. Get all the players in a room. We will sit down. I will do it. I will be here all day and all night and all weekend.

But I have to tell you, you can't use one group of people as a shield to not fund all the other border missions, all the other funding, FEMA. You can't do it.

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Ms. SLOTKIN. Please.

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Ms. SLOTKIN. I am in.

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Ms. SLOTKIN. 362, S. 4127; that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.
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Ms. SLOTKIN. Mr. President, I rise today against the so-called SAVE America Act.

I believe that our elections are the foundation of our democracy. Most Americans do. It is how we protect our country from tyranny and dictatorship. It is how we remain the greatest country in the world. But the SAVE Act does not safeguard our elections; it does the opposite.

My Republican colleagues like to repeat over and over that this is about voter ID at the polls, that showing ID at the polls is something we have to do, and that is what this bill is about.

That already happens. Most Americans--99.999 percent of Americans do what everyone else does: They walk into the polls on election day. They bring their ID. The volunteers and the clerks check your ID, they check it to the voter rolls, and they say: Come on in and go ahead and vote. That already happens across the country and certainly in the State of Michigan.

This bill is not about voter ID, which hopefully all Americans are in agreement about; it is about making it harder to vote so that more Americans are excluded from voting.

It requires that Americans have proof of citizenship in order to vote. Just by example, I brought my Michigan license, OK? Michigan license--it is the official State version. There is no proof of citizenship. It says my address. It says my eye color. It says all these things, but it does not have my citizenship. It is just not on the license. For most Americans, it is not on the license.

So how would I prove my citizenship? Well, I can do it, I guess, in two ways. You can either bring a passport with you or you can bring an original birth certificate in the name you want to vote with.

Passports--60 percent of Michiganders have no passport. They have never applied for one. They don't need one. They are not interested in one.

If you want to get a passport, it is nearly $200. So now we are charging a fee for people to do what I hope most people believe is a God-given right as an American--to vote. If not, you have to have an original copy of your birth certificate in the name you want to vote in. Well, as you can imagine, for millions and millions of women who took their married name, took their husband's name, their birth certificate doesn't show the name they plan to vote with. So it puts an unbelievably onerous requirement on those married women.

This bill also truly constrains mail-in voting. This is going to hurt senior citizens, military, folks in nursing homes, college students who don't live at home. This is intended simply to make it harder to vote.

I want to double-tap this because Michiganders weighed in on the ballot on this very issue. In 2018, Michiganders voted in a law that said that anyone could vote absentee for any reason, and it passed with 67 percent of the vote. And I will remind you that Donald Trump has won my State twice. In the years since, voter participation has gone up. I would hope that would be seen as a good thing.

Mail-in voting is safe, it is secure, it is the law in Michigan, and undoing it is simply to satisfy President Trump's very specific goals of making sure ``only the right people vote.''

As a nation, we have made a lot of strides in the past 50 years in getting more people to vote. The SAVE Act undoes that, and it represents a significant change--it gives the Federal Government enormous power over voting. That is exactly what the Founding Fathers wanted to avoid. They specifically wrote into the Constitution that the administration of elections is to be done by the States. In the commentary on it, they said that was because we never want a President and his supporters to have overwhelming power over the organs of democracy, over the foundation of our elections. So they give that administrative power to the States.

President Trump and my colleagues across the aisle have railed against Federal involvement in our elections. They have signed amicus briefs and talked about overreach by the Federal Government in our elections--when they thought it was going to hurt them. Now they have done a complete 180.

If you want to understand where my colleagues really stand on this issue, just look at their comments and President Trump's Statement of Administration Policy when the House in 2019 passed the John Lewis Voting Rights Act--literally in many ways a codification of the Voting Rights Act of the late sixties.

Many of my colleagues were happy to criticize the Federal Government telling States how to run their elections. They gave speeches about it. They went on the media about it and talked all about Democratic overreach.

But this is how you know they have lost the plot--because when it is their team that is in power, when it is their team that is in the White House, when it is their team that is giving them their orders, they are happy to federalize things.

Everybody knows that the Republican Party was always the party of smaller government and States' rights. That is like the brand.

So now here we are. Donald Trump says in the State of the Union that if his team doesn't win in November, the elections are rigged, and he only wants ``the right people voting.''

So here we have this bill that they don't have the votes for, and they are talking about what they are going to do to help ``save America.''

In Michigan, just to put the issue in perspective, because my colleagues like facts, we have about 6 million voters out of 10 million in our State. In 2024, in an election won by Donald Trump--wasn't contested by anyone on the other side of the aisle--15 individual voters were flagged as potentially being noncitizens--15 out of 6 million. Even one noncitizen voting is a bad thing, and they should be held accountable, and they were to the highest and utmost of the law in Michigan, including spending some time in jail for one guy. But 15 out of 6 million is 0.00025 percent. These 15 were flagged and even confirmed quickly as noncitizens.

This bill is like using a bazooka to go after a housefly. It is not smart. And in the process, it makes it harder for millions of Americans--particularly women--to vote in these elections. And make no mistake, that is the point.

We are only debating this bill because of one fact: Donald Trump doesn't like to lose elections, and his team wants to shield him from another embarrassing loss this coming fall. That is it.

He has shown us from the beginning how he feels about fraud. Seven months before the 2020 election, he got up in front of the United States and said: If I don't win in 2020, the election is rigged.

You know, people in this body wrote strongly worded letters. They pooh-poohed it. They said there is no way an American President will actually try to refute the results of a democratic election where clerks, Democrat and Republican, across the country are just doing their jobs.

Fast-forward to January 6, and people in this body are hightailing it off this floor, barricading themselves in their offices--as I did on the House side--looking for a weapon to protect themselves, as a mob instigated by the President crashed into this very floor. It sounds familiar to me.

In the State of the Union just a month ago, the President said:

The only way the Democrats can get elected is if they cheat.

Is that what my colleagues on the other side of the aisle believe? Do you believe that the only way that I am here is because I cheated?

Donald Trump won on the top of my ballot. Did I cheat to get here? Did he win his last election or no?

Passing the SAVE Act will ``guarantee the midterms'' for Republicans--another thing he said.

We are only here because you are doing his bidding and trying to pass a bill that he says will help him guarantee the election.

He said:

We will never lose a race. . . . For 50 years [if this passes], we won't lose a race.

Does that sound like someone who actually gives a flying fig about actual democracy or does that sound like someone who is asking his boys to rig elections for him in November?

Now, I was polite the last time the President of the United States did this. In 2020, I was one of those people who said: You know what, the President can't really mean this. Let's send letters. Let's talk about it politely on camera.

I spoke up at hearings. We asked the military what they were going to do if the President tried to steal the election.

Frankly, I and a lot of us on this floor had a failure of imagination for what this President would do, but I am not going to make that mistake again.

I will close with this: The President of the United States has laid out what he believes for everyone to see. We have to believe the words he is telling us.

That same President is now grinding the Senate to a halt by trying to pass a bill that doesn't do a single thing for your pocketbook, your house, your kids, your healthcare, or anything else he ran on. He is busy taking weeks at a time on this floor--time we could otherwise be working in a bipartisan manner to pass things that would help people with their cost of living--but he wants to do this because he wants to make sure he is not embarrassed in the fall.

All of those promises he said he was going to fulfill, that he has left open--he doesn't want the chickens to come home to roost for him in November.

So as Michiganders are waiting in line at the gas pumps right now, as the price of gas jumps 60 cents per day in some cases, as middle-class Americans are unable to buy a home, we are talking about making it harder for women and old people and the military to vote.

Instead of addressing the fundamental issues of Americans, we are doing the bidding of the President of the United States because he told us all that if he doesn't win, it is rigged, so we better cover down for him.

This is not what we should be spending our time on. Focus on the issues that the American public is calling all of us--asking us to address. It is not what we need.

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