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Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I am back again to address the SAVE America Act, and what I can't really get my brain around is the fact that in a recent poll, 71 percent of Americans support the SAVE America Act.

Now, it is no secret that our Nation is politically polarized, but when 71 percent of Americans think that this is a good idea and we can't get it done, it is pretty hard to explain. So let me try.

So why would you say that we oppose only American citizens being able to vote? Why would you say that? Why would you oppose the proposition that only American citizens can vote? And why would you oppose the proposition that in order to cast a ballot, that you need to produce an ID, a picture ID?

Well, maybe there are other explanations that I haven't thought of, but the explanation that occurs to me is because you think that illegal aliens should be able to vote. Maybe you think that people should not have to produce a photo ID so they can pretend to be somebody they are not and cast a ballot on their behalf.

I wish our Democratic colleagues would just come out and fess up and admit that that is their motivation: letting illegal aliens vote and letting people commit voter fraud by pretending to be somebody they are not because they are not required to produce a photo ID.

Well, I can think of maybe one other explanation. You remember back when the President spoke at the State of the Union, he asked for all the members of the audience there assembled before him in front of the whole country to stand if you support law enforcement and public safety and not illegal immigrants? All Republicans stood; all Democrats sat on their hands.

I found it particularly telling when some of the TV cameras zoomed in on some of the Democrats who were very--if I am interpreting their body language correctly--they were very uncomfortable because they knew that what they were doing was wrong, but they felt like for some reason they had to do it.

And then there is the decision of the President to eliminate the nuclear weapons program of the Iranian regime. The Iranian regime is the No. 1 state sponsor of international terrorism. They have had American blood on their hands for 47 years, since the Iranian Revolution, produced these explosively foreign penetrators that killed or maimed the servicemembers of the United States over many years, their proxies, the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Iranian--the Shia militias. They have American blood on their hands, and the Biden administration and previous administrations knew that they aspired to have a nuclear weapon.

Now, I cannot imagine anything worse than the No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism getting a nuclear weapon. They are committed to the death of Israel. They want to wipe Israel off the map, but they also chant ``Death to America.''

What is it about that, that we don't understand and believe? And thank goodness President Trump had the courage--political and otherwise, and the confidence in the United States military--to do what needed to be done in order to protect our own troops in the Middle East and help prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

What do our Democratic colleagues do? They said: Well, Trump started the war, and there is no identifiable end state, so we oppose what President Trump is doing.

So Trump derangement syndrome causes people to do really strange things, to take the side of the No. 1 state sponsor of international terrorism that wants a nuclear weapon, to cause Members of Congress to sit on their hands rather than to support and applaud our law enforcement personnel that keep our communities safe.

And now, we see this happening at our airports across the country where, because of Democratic obstruction, our TSA agents--the people who are maintaining the security at the airports--they have been working. They have now missed two paychecks--and for what good reason could that be?

Well, I think it is Trump derangement syndrome. They know that President Trump wants the Department of Homeland Security funded, which means they automatically reflexively don't want it funded and they frankly don't care who they hurt.

It is shameful. It ought to be embarrassing, but some people can't be embarrassed. So Democrats are now forced into a strange posture on this SAVE America Act, which requires proof of citizenship to vote and proof of identification in order to cast a ballot.

Democrats are forced into the awkward position of saying we should block--they should block this legislation that so many of their own constituents apparently want and agree with.

I have to say listening to some of what passes for arguments on the other side, I find myself unpersuaded by their fearmongering. I remember I asked in the Judiciary Committee the other day--I asked the ranking member, the Democratic whip Senator Durbin from Illinois, I said: What is it that the Democrats dislike about the SAVE America Act?

He said: Well, it will disenfranchise people.

Well, not if you can show you are an American citizen, not if you have a photo ID. You are not going to be disenfranchised. So that must mean that you are worried about disenfranchising noncitizens, illegal immigrants. You are worried about disenfranchising the election cheat who wouldn't be required to show photo ID but yet casts a ballot pretending to be someone they are not.

Two days ago, Minority Leader Schumer came to the Senate floor and said: The SAVE Act is not about election integrity. It is voter suppression. Well, he is half right. It is illegal-voter suppression.

But his general argument that American citizens would be denied the opportunity to vote is patently false. Thirty-eight States, including States like Georgia and Rhode Island, currently represented by Democrats, require voter ID. Are those States suppressing the vote? Is the minority leader suggesting that 38 out of our 50 States are actively engaged in voter suppression?

Well, that is preposterous on its face. Some States like my State of Texas requires voters to show an ID with an option to sign an affidavit alongside the secondary form of ID to establish their identity. In other words, we make it easy.

So the idea that the SAVE America Act will disenfranchise legitimate voters is a baldfaced--well, let me try to be generous. It is not true, and he knows it. The Democratic leader knows that is false, but he has the temerity to stand up here on the Senate floor and to tell people who may not be informed about the details of this, that we are trying to take away their right to vote.

Well, it is the Democrats who are diluting your vote if you are a qualified voter by allowing noncitizens or people who engage in election fraud the opportunity to vote.

They are diluting your vote, making it less valuable. So the SAVE America Act will not disenfranchise legitimate voters. It will simply universalize ID requirements, so that all 50 States will play by the same rules.

Another charge that we are hearing is that, well, it is just too hard to prove you are an American citizen because you need a passport. You will need a passport to vote, and any requirement that you need a passport will be too burdensome. Well, of course, anybody who has traveled will have a passport, of course.

But, once again, this argument that you need a passport to vote is not true. The SAVE America Act allows Americans to prove their citizenship by a variety of documents, including, but not limited to, a passport.

Americans can present an enhanced driver's license, a REAL ID- compliant license, or a State ID card, all of which are sufficient under this bill to prove you are an American citizen.

I have a REAL ID driver's license in my pocket as do most drivers. We required licenses, post-9/11, to prevent terrorists from getting false identities and traveling on our airplanes and blowing them out of the sky. We required that States eventually would require a REAL ID, which just has a radio frequency chip in it that is hard to counterfeit so that we have assurance that people who produce a driver's license with a REAL ID in it are who they say they are.

So you don't need a passport. You can use a military identification card. You can use a certificate of naturalization, if you weren't born in this country but became, by grace of God, an American citizen.

Furthermore, if an American does not have any of the above, they can pair a photo ID with their birth certificate, a consular report of birth abroad, or similar documents. In other words, there are a lot of different ways that people can establish that they are qualified to vote.

Finally, and perhaps the most outrageous charge that our Democratic colleagues have been flinging at us is that married women--we are going to disenfranchise married women whose birth certificate does not reflect their current married name. They won't be able to vote.

Well, that would be foolish if that were true. As somebody who is not only married for 46 years but the father of two adult daughters, I promise I would be the last person on the planet to tell a woman she has no right to vote.

So this is nothing but a scare tactic. Certainly it is easy to be able to establish, based on a marriage license or something else, some other qualifying document, that your birth certificate name is different than your married name. So this is nothing more than a scare tactic by our colleagues who want, what? Why are they objecting to this? Let me put it less charitably. They want to make it easier for people to cheat. That is a harsh statement, but you tell me what the other alternatives are. They want to make it easier to cheat.

The reality is, the SAVE America Act provides a process for anyone who changes their legal name for reasons of marriage or otherwise to register to vote.

And anyone who is already registered to vote at the time they change their name would just have to update their voter registration. Well, I think women voters should be offended that somehow they are not capable of being able to identify themselves, either with a marriage license or a birth certificate, or that it is just too hard for them; they can't figure it out.

That is insulting. Well, I have full confidence that American citizens who happen to be female who go through these heroic efforts to keep our businesses running and take care of our families, I have full confidence they will be capable of updating their voter registration to match their new married name.

To listen to our Democratic colleagues, you would think the American people are incapable of thinking for themselves or are incapable of simply locating these legal documents.

And we are not doing this for frivolous reasons. It is because, apparently, our Democratic colleagues think that noncitizens should be allowed to vote and that election fraudsters should be able to vote without proving their identity.

On behalf of the 32 million Texans I represent, I find this argument deeply offensive.

America is the greatest place on Earth. What we have here is the envy of people around the world who want to come here because of the opportunities that this great country provides.

But one of the most important aspects of America is that our laws are passed by elected representatives and that our laws are legitimized by the consent of the governed, who cast a vote on behalf of those officeholders, those Members of Congress on their behalf. And these are positions of trust that we hold. But the authority comes from the voters and comes from the citizens, not illegal immigrants, not election fraudsters.

That undermines the very foundation upon which the legitimacy of our government rests. I think a country with citizens bright enough to put a man on the Moon and to build the strongest, most powerful military in the world and the greatest economy that the world has ever known, I think those folks are smart enough and capable enough to be able to locate their driver's license when they cast a ballot and to establish their citizenship in order to qualify to vote.

Any suggestion to the contrary is ridiculous.

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