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Floor Speech

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Mr. HICKENLOOPER. Mr. President, I am going to switch gears a little bit here. I want to talk a little bit about the SAVE Act.

Despite its name, the SAVE Act is not going to help you or anyone in America save on anything. It won't help you save on your gas bill, your medicine, your rent. It won't help you save on student loans or childcare or what you pay for utilities. This bill has nothing to do with money at all, and it certainly isn't about helping Americans.

We are going to fight against this bill with everything we have got, and it will fail because it is bad for the country. That is right--the Republicans know the bill will fail, and they are intent on dragging this out for hours, for days that could be spent addressing the real issues that Americans face.

The cost of gas is rising every day, week after week. In parts of Colorado, the price of gasoline has almost doubled in the last several weeks. That is money taken straight out of your pockets. Grocery prices are going up. Doctor's visits are going up. Housing costs are going up as well.

Right now, one in three American households spends more than 30 percent of their income on housing--one-third. And when they are not shelling out for rent, they are shelling out more for healthcare. Despite living in the wealthiest country in the world, Americans pay the highest costs for healthcare globally and in many cases get worse results.

But we don't have to tell all of America this. We don't have to tell all of you this; you already know it. You are living it every single day--at the checkout line, in the pharmacy, at the doctor's office, when you pay your electric or water bill.

And here is what makes it worse. You are doing everything right. You are working longer hours, picking up second jobs. You are cutting back in every way you can to make ends meet. You are skipping vacations. You are delaying buying a home. You are putting off starting a family. Some folks today are even skipping doses of medication just to stretch their prescription a few more days. This is not because you want to but because you have no choice, you see no other way.

A year ago, at his inauguration, our President promised lower prices and no more foreign wars. This administration has already spent 20 billion of your dollars waging war on Iran, and the war has gotten bigger, bloodier, and more expensive every day since. Just today, the Pentagon announced their plan to ask Congress for $200 billion to fund the war in Iran--$200 billion. That is money that we don't have. Our deficit last year was somewhere in the vicinity of $1\3/4\ trillion. Yet Congress is going to be asked to borrow $200 billion more and add that to the national debt.

The SAVE Act isn't going to save any of that. It is not going to save any American any money, and it certainly isn't going to change reality.

So what is it really about? I think it is about saving this administration's failing agenda. And how is that? It is through voter suppression.

The President knows that costs are high. He knows that you are angry. He knows that the majority of Americans disapprove of the war, are unhappy that their costs keep rising. But instead of actually lowering prices, he is backing a bill that is going to make it harder for most people to vote, especially for Americans whom he doesn't trust will vote for him.

The SAVE America Act creates mountains of redtape for voters and will ultimately remove millions of Americans from the voting rolls-- Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. It requires every voter to dig through their basement, go up into their attic, and try to find their birth certificate--right--find their passport, just so they can register to vote, something most of them have been doing year after year for decades.

But there are problems--real problems--with this plan. More than 21 million American citizens don't have their original birth certificate handy or they don't have a passport, they don't have either one of these types of identification; and 69 million married women have birth certificates that don't have their correct last name. They changed their name when they got married.

Taken together, the SAVE America Act would make it more difficult for tens of millions of people to vote. It would also dismantle vote-by- mail as we know it. Now, about one in three Americans voted by mail in 2024, an election that President Trump won. During the 2024 election, the voters most likely to vote by mail were those over the age of 65. It is the single best way for folks with limited mobility to exercise their constitutional right.

Just look at Colorado. Almost 99 percent of Republican voters in Colorado voted by mail in 2025. Now, way back in 2013, when I was still the Governor, we passed a set of laws that established our State as the gold standard for secure and accessible elections. We started by making voting as accessible as possible. We established one of the first universal vote-by-mail systems in the country. Now, you can still vote in person, but every single Coloradan gets a ballot mailed to them. Now, these reforms were largely created by Republican county clerks working with our Republican secretary of state.

Vote-by-mail has proven to be less expensive, more secure, and people love it. The turnout just goes up. It is perhaps the single most effective way to increase voter turnout. Today, as I said, every single registered voter gets a ballot in the mail. Every ballot that they receive in the mail is printed on paper, meaning that we have a physical record across the entire voting system that can be easily audited at even the faintest hint of fraud. And we go beyond that.

It is basic common sense. The ballot arrives weeks before the election, which gives Coloradans plenty of time to research the candidates, talk around the kitchen table about whom they think is going to do the best job, and submit their ballot by mail or go drop it off at a ballot box. And even if voters wait until the last minute, they can still register to vote and vote on election day.

Now, Colorado Republicans were behind this initiative literally every step of the way because this was about making voting, the act of voting, easier for everyone. Coloradans--Democrats, Republicans, Independents--we have almost a third--actually, we have more than a third Independents now--everybody loves this system. During the 2025 election, 98 percent of all the Coloradans who voted, voted by mail. They submitted mail-in ballots. They dropped it off or they put it in the mail.

And Coloradans didn't just make voting accessible; we made it secure. We created a multilayer system of checks and balances. Every single drop box that receives ballots is under 24-hour video surveillance from the time the box opens for ballot return until the end of an election-- day and night. We made sure Coloradans could track their ballot the same way you would use FedEX or UPS to track a package so voters could trust that their ballot had been counted.

And in 2017, under the leadership of the Republican secretary of state Wayne Williams, Colorado took election security to the next level. We became the first State in the Nation to conduct a bipartisan statewide audit after every election. The results from these audits over the 6 years show that Colorado's vote-counting systems were more than 99.99 percent accurate. We put the burden on a team of Democratic and Republican leaders to use the State's resources--in other words, the State pays for this--to ensure that every person who votes is eligible and every vote counted matches the ballot.

Now, the SAVE Act would completely reverse this progress. It would bog down the voter in endless mountains of new redtape, and in the end, millions of Americans wouldn't cast a ballot at all. Now, think about it and ask yourself who this really impacts: seniors who no longer drive, rural Americans who live hours from a government office. These are likely Republican voters, but it is going to impact them negatively. It will impact working parents who can't take time off to track down paperwork or take work off to vote in person. It would impact women whose last names have changed, as I mentioned. At the end of the day, none of it helps you, the voter.

It is all a distraction--a rather large distraction. Every hour that we are spending in the debate about the SAVE America Act is an hour we are not spending bringing down the cost of groceries or housing, healthcare.

While Americans are worried about costs and they are worried about their families and their future, the administration is relitigating the 2020 election and waging a war most Americans don't want. All of this chaos--from Colorado to Venezuela to Iran to Minnesota--is one big distraction from this administration's failure to lower costs for Americans.

The bill was never about saving Americans money. They call it the SAVE Act. It creates a misrepresentation. But what we should be here today to accomplish is to figure out how to save money for the American people, for all of you.

If your agenda is working and you are delivering on promises, you don't have to make it harder for people to vote. I would argue that agenda might not be working. I think the results, if your agenda is working--and the people--speak for themselves.

So let me spell it out. Americans want lower costs--not wars abroad, not violence in the streets. Americans are looking literally for any sign that this administration still sees them, still sees the rising grocery costs, the gas prices, the huge bill increases from doctors' offices.

This administration refuses to acknowledge these problems exist, and there is so much infighting within the President's ranks that they can't decide whether this war will go on for 2 weeks or 5 weeks or a year. Are American troops going to be deployed? The jury is still out on that as well. It is a lot of noise and not a lot of substance. So far, there is no evidence of a comprehensive plan and certainly no--and by that I mean zero--accountability to the American people.

Let's remember, the Pentagon just announced their plan to ask Congress for $200 billion to fund the war in Iran. They want the American taxpayers to sign off on borrowing--because we don't have the cash--$200 billion more money--$200 billion more. With that kind of money, we could fund universal pre-K in every State in this country, we could get to universal healthcare coverage, we could have free school meals for every child and free community college for every American for a full year.

So when they shout out the importance of the SAVE Act, remember this one thing: It will not help you save a penny on your rent, your groceries, the cost of your healthcare. The only thing it is saving, I would argue, is their political skin.

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