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Floor Speech
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Mr. BENNET. Thank you, Madam President.
May I be recognized after Senator Merkley, Madam President?
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Mr. BENNET. Thank you, Madam President.
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Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I thank the Presiding Officer for the recognition.
I spent last weekend in Grand Junction. I am happy to be here tonight on the floor with my colleague from Colorado John Hickenlooper. I spent last weekend in Grand Junction, in our State, on Colorado's Western Slope. And my conversations with young parents and with families just starting out, I think--I would hope--would be familiar to many colleagues that are here. We discussed the price of housing, which has surged over 80 percent over the last 10 years in Colorado; the price of healthcare, which is ratcheting higher and becoming impossible for families to afford, not just in Colorado but all across our country; the cost of childcare, which is making it harder for families to live any semblance of a middle-class life--families that are working two jobs just to pay the mortgage can't even afford childcare when they are working with those two salaries--and our inability as a nation, as a State, to prepare our kids for the dynamic and potentially hugely unforgiving economy they are about to enter. This is a tough economy that we are in today, and tariffs and now gas prices haven't helped.
Last week, colleagues, I met with a food bank from El Paso County, who told me that they stay open late--listen to this, U.S. Senate. This food bank in El Paso County said that they stay open late 1 day a week to have teachers' night so the teachers that have worked all week teaching children have the opportunity to come to that food bank in the evening to get food to feed their own children at home.
I doubt very much that there is a living American who can remember a decade in this country when we took it for granted that teachers would have to go to a food bank to feed their own children.
Can you imagine, in the 1950s, in this Chamber, if it were known that people teaching in America--in inner-city America or in the suburbs of our great cities--that the pay wasn't satisfactory, so they had to go to a food bank after work?
And that is happening to working people all over our country, people that are in what we think of as traditional middle-class lives, because of how savage this economy has been, because of the affordability crisis that, I will say, has been with us for decades in this country but the current administration, the Trump administration, has made far worse and now is making it even worse with what they are doing to energy prices because of their unauthorized war in the Middle East.
I wish we were working on that affordability crisis today. I wish we were working on building an economy that worked for everybody, not just the people at the very top.
This is a choice that is being made by President Trump and the majority in this Senate, the Republicans, who have spent the entire week fighting for a bill that will make it harder for family members and for aging parents and for their cousins to vote or to register to vote. That is what they have chosen to use the floor of the U.S. Senate to do. It is shameful. It is shameful both because it is ignoring the affordability crisis that our families are facing, but it is shameful because there is no excuse for taking away the right to vote from people all over the United States of America.
These are people who are supposed to believe in States' rights, believe in the ability of States to be able to run their own affairs. And Donald Trump--President Trump--and the Republican's SAVE America Act rewrites the way we run elections in America completely. It rips up the processes all over the United States of America at the local level that county clerks and election officials understand. It requires the Federal Government to have access to the voter rolls, a shocking thing from the party that is supposed to be about States' rights.
And it creates yet another unfunded mandate for States and for local communities. There is no money in here to fund the stuff that is in this bill.
Most troublingly, it imposes new document requirements for voter registration that many Americans do not have or do not have access to. Madam President, 146 million Americans don't have a passport. Almost 70 million women do not have a birth certificate that matches their real name. That should be self-evident to anybody in this Chamber, but it is ignored completely by the people who wrote this legislation.
Over 8 million Americans have moved to a different State within the last year, and an average of over 17 million will have moved counties. Many of them--probably most--do not have the paperwork that this bill requires. That doesn't make any sense. These people aren't trying to evade the law. These people are availing themselves of their right as an American citizen to move from place to place in this Nation.
This radical legislation actually requires people to register in- person, banning common methods, as we heard from the Senator from Alaska who is standing up for her State as she always does.
We should be supporting her. We should be supporting Alaska's way of running their elections rather than imposing Donald Trump's corrupt way of running his elections.
This radical legislation actually requires people to register in- person, banning common methods of registration--online registration, through the mail, or automatically at the DMV.
That is how 94 percent of Americans register to vote. Many of them are seniors. Many of them live in rural communities. I would like to see the majority party in this Chamber come to western Colorado and try to take--rather than having this fake filibuster--try to actually take mail-in ballots from the people of western Colorado.
I would like to see that. They would avail themselves of any means necessary to prevent that from happening.
The SAVE America Act would set our voter registration process back decades. If you are one of the more than 60 million Americans who live in rural areas, you might now need to drive hundreds of miles to stand in line at a local election agency.
If you live overseas, you will have to fly back. If you don't have a passport, you better have your birth certificate. If you don't have your birth certificate or you changed your name like tens of millions of married women across this country living in the 21st century, you will have to provide additional documents and sign affidavits.
All of this will--
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Mr. BENNET. I will not yield. I will not yield. I have waited an hour--
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Mr. BENNET. You will have your time.
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Mr. BENNET. Thank you, Madam President. Thank you, Madam President.
Madam President, I will yield for the one inaccuracy you think that I have--
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Mr. BENNET. Well, then you will have to wait. Then you will have to wait. Then you will have to wait.
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Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I haven't yielded the floor.
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Mr. BENNET. I didn't. I said I would yield for one inaccuracy. That is all I said.
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Mr. BENNET. I am not willing to hear it. I am not willing to hear it. I will hear it after--
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Mr. BENNET. I don't believe I did yield.
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Mr. BENNET. If I did yield--
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Mr. BENNET. I will exercise my right to withdraw.
Madam President, all of this will have to be done in-person. Kansas tried to implement its own State-level version of President Trump's SAVE America Act in 2013 with disastrous results.
This law, which included citizenship documentation requirements, ended up blocking the voter registration of more than 31,000 U.S. citizens who are otherwise eligible to vote. That represented about 12 percent of all Kansas voter registrations during that period.
Even Kansas Republican secretary of state who championed the bill when he was a State legislator has warned against the bill now before us. He has warned against the bill now before us saying: It didn't work out so well.
And Kansas law was blocked by a Federal court, as it should have been.
If we pass this bill, we will have now two different election--Madam President, can I have the floor without the interruption of my colleague from Utah?
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Mr. BENNET. If you guys are done, I would like to--Madam President, I would like--
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Mr. BENNET. Madam President, if we pass this bill, we will now have two different election regimes in this country--one for Federal elections and one for local elections. That is insane in and of itself and begs the question: Why does Donald Trump want to pass this bill?
He wants to run roughshod over our election system because he claims there is an epidemic of voter fraud caused by undocumented people voting. That is at the heart of his claim, and that has been the heart of his claim throughout two Presidential elections and this Presidency.
The problem is that he is blowing up our elections, and there is no evidence to support his claim of fraud. The fact is that even his own Department of Homeland Security used by many States to verify voter citizenship returned .04 percent of voter participants as noncitizens.
A bipartisan policy center analysis of the Heritage Foundation's debate of noncitizen voting found only 77 cases in 25 years of nearly 2 billion votes cast.
And individual States tell us the same. We heard it earlier tonight. Last year, Utah performed a citizen review of its entire voter registration list. There was no noncompliance. After an assessment of more than 2 million registered voters, Utah identified only 1 confirmed instance of noncitizen registration and no instances of noncitizen voting.
We definitely have a crisis in our democracy and in our economy and they are related. Over the decades, we have suffered through an economy that has reduced economic mobility and hollowed out America's middle class.
At the same time, we have built a tax system that disproportionately benefits those who own assets and perpetuates the inequalities that accumulated with generational wealth, a tax system that allows Donald Trump and Elon Musk to pass their stock portfolios onto their heirs without paying a dollar on the gains that they have accrued.
That is a crisis. The lack of economic mobility is a crisis, and I am sorry to say that that tax regime, that has been done in a bipartisan manner. Republicans definitely more than Democrats have pursued trickle-down economics, but Democrats and Republicans both played a role creating an unfair system that reinforces our desperate lack of economic mobility and concretizes our deep and growing economic inequality.
At the same time, this body has failed to make important investment in our infrastructure while saddling future generations with ever- greater amounts of debt, debt whose service costs will now predictably take up $1 trillion of our annual budget in interest--more than we spend on Medicare or defense, a higher share of the economy than at any point in American history.
We are in a dangerous moment at home and abroad. There is no doubt about that. And at the same time as Coloradans and Americans across the country are struggling to get by, as teachers are going to those food banks to feed their own children, when confidence in our institutions and in our politics is at record lows, and we have a campaign finance system that gives inordinate power to the wealthiest.
Tonight is not the night to go through how wrongly decided Citizens United was, how wrongly decided, how ignorant that decision was of the way politics actually works in this country.
But let me just point out to you that in 2008, before Citizens United was decided, the top 100 individual donors contributed a combined $80 million--$80 million in 2008. That is what the 100 donors contributed.
In 2024, the top 10 donors--the top 10 donors--contributed over $1.2 billion. Spending by outside groups has exploded from a total of $574 million in 2008 to almost $4.5 billion in that last election, an increase of 8 times--8 times.
No one could possibly believe that the amount of money--that that amount of money is helping our democracy. Let me tell you something: Does the SAVE Act do anything about that corrosiveness in our politics? Of course not. Of course not.
And let me tell you something that was a fatal flaw in the Supreme Court's decision while I am here. Maybe the pages, when they are Senators, will be able to fix this problem because we sure aren't going fix it.
At the end of that--at the end of their decision, they said: By the way, if the Congress ever passes a constitutional regulation of--in their words--constitutional regulation of the outside spending in our political system, we will, of course, have to give that the proper analysis, the proper--excuse me--the required constitutional analysis.
Of course, nobody will ever pass that around here because the billionaires that are writing checks to these elections just have to rattle the pennies in their pockets and the change in their pockets and threaten to run a primary against anybody in this place, and the bill won't be brought.
And then there is a profound corruption of inaction that sets in as a result to our legislative branch both here and in the House of Representatives.
Does the SAVE America Act address any of this? Of course not. Instead, Donald Trump and the Republicans have brought to the floor a bill to make it harder for ordinary American citizens to register and to vote.
Fundamentally, the SAVE America Act is an astonishing Federal overreach in search of a scandal that doesn't exist and would have the effect of undermining fraud-free elections like we have in Colorado.
Colorado was the first State in America to complete a risk-limiting audit, the gold standard for verifying the integrity of election results.
It entails counting and comparing a representative sample of ballots to the reported result. To prevent hacking, none of our voting machines are connected to the internet. We require county clerks to use two- factor authentication to access voter databases.
Once a vote is cast, a bipartisan team of election judges in each county checks every signature against the copy in the database for any discrepancies. All election officials and judges with access to the tabulation process must first pass a Colorado Bureau of Investigation background check. And Colorado has spent years--years--implementing top-tier cyber security measures and audits to prevent hackers from interfering in our electoral process.
We should be modeling our Federal system off the gold standard framework we have in Colorado, a national leader in terms of voter access, election security, and might I say, voter turnout.
Instead, the SAVE America Act would eliminate--eliminate, outlaw-- many of the practices that Colorado has adopted to keep our elections safe and increase voter confidence.
How dare you?
It would end Colorado's mail-in and online voter registration system. It would force Colorado to increase the security risks of our voter data and routinely purge voter rolls. It would push experienced county clerks and election workers out of the field. It would remove the possibility of using a number of State IDs when going to vote. It would create two tiers of voting for Federal and State elections and possibly upend our mail-in ballot system itself by requiring that every Coloradan proactively request a ballot and resubmit proof of ID alongside their ballot request in every election.
Colorado already has ID requirements when casting a ballot. We already have among the cleanest voter rolls in this country. We don't need Donald Trump to corrupt our process. Even the Heritage Foundation ranked us as second in the Nation in 2020 for clean lists--the Heritage Foundation.
We have one of the most secure election systems of any State in our country, and because Coloradans have trust in our elections, we have some of the highest voter turnouts in the country.
But the SAVE America Act--the so-called SAVE America Act--does not bring our system anywhere close to what we enjoy in Colorado. Instead it turns into a dark but familiar pattern in American history.
And I am sorry to say, but this bill before us is just another in a long line of legislative efforts to limit the franchise in this country, to add new restrictions and additional obstacles.
Nobody wants voter fraud. I do not want voter fraud. I come from a State where there is no voter fraud. We set the gold standard, in part because of the work my colleague John Hickenlooper did when he was Governor of Colorado.
This is a pretext. This is a pretext to invade our elections.
I know my colleague from Texas wants to speak. So I am trying to skip ahead here.
We have had a fight over many, many, many years in this Nation to broaden the franchise, from the very beginning, and that fight was won by men and women who marched to demand that their vote count equally in this country, no matter what color they were, no matter where they lived in our Nation, no matter what education or religion their parents had or whether their parents were immigrants to this country.
In this modern era, when one of the real fundamental risks to our democracy is the American people's loss of confidence in our institutions, including our voting process and elections themselves, we now have a group of people who are trying to create political advantage for themselves by restricting the vote in the name of addressing a mythical voter fraud that does not exist.
The American people will not be fooled by this. They will be angry about this, as they should. The American people have come to rely on vote-by-mail, and registration by mail, and early voting. They believe our system is fraud free, and where it is not, the State should address it.
Our citizens have come to rely on having the franchise extended through modern technology and modern practices. Nobody I know in Colorado has said they doubt the validity or veracity of our voting system--no matter what party they are in or whether they live in rural Colorado or urban Colorado--or the importance of the ability to register online, or for students and others to have the benefit of same-day registration.
I wish everybody in this country had the benefit of that. Those are ways of encouraging participation in our democracy. None of us want fraud.
None of us want fraud. And there is no fraud. The good news is there is certainly no evidence in Colorado or across the country that that fraud exists.
And this is the most sweeping effort, make no mistake, by Donald Trump, by the Republicans here in the Senate, to ``nationalize our elections,'' to undermine voter confidence, and inject new chaos into a system he is terrified will turn against him; to make life harder for Americans that he thinks voted against him, and probably will make it harder for the people who voted for him.
Since the President's return to office, he has focused relentlessly on false narratives of voter fraud. He has issued Executive orders that are unenforceable. He has sued States that have refused to comply and threatened to take control of the electoral process in States he views as political enemies.
He has sent Federal agents from the FBI and the Director of National Intelligence to seize ballots in Georgia, election records in Arizona, and voting machines in Puerto Rico.
His Justice Department has sued 30 States, including Colorado, demanding sensitive, unredacted voter data to create a national voter database. And President Trump has pursued a longstanding and inexplicable grievance against mail-in voting, which he falsely claims can be used to commit mass amounts of fraud. It is simply not true. It is simply not true.
He sees it, in his own words--the SAVE America Act--as a method to ``guarantee the midterms'' this November. He sees, in his own words, the SAVE America Act as a method to ``guarantee the midterms'' this November. And that is why they put this on this floor now? I hope not. I really hope not.
This is an election bill that distorts our shared understanding of what free and fair elections should look like, and Coloradans want no part of it.
This legislation, by the way, is wildly unpopular in America. We have received thousands of calls and letters in opposition to the SAVE America Act. We received over 7,000 last month alone.
This week I assisted my 85 year old mom get her first-ever passport. She did not get it so she could travel with us and enjoy her remaining years. She got it because she felt it was the best way to ensure that she had proper identification/ proof of citizenship to continuing voting and/or change her voter registration. Like many married women, her surname on her driver's license and her surname on her birth certificate do not match.
My mom spent $195 to be able to apply for the passport: $15 for a certified copy of her birth certificate, $130 for the passport book, $15 for the necessary photo, and $35 for the facility acceptance fee. She lives in Colorado Springs, but we drove to Woodland Park for the appointment to drop off her passport application because getting an appointment at either of the Colorado Springs acceptance locations is, well, let's call it ``challenging.''
Fortunately, $195 won't keep mom from eating and we had the ability to run around and make this happen. Not all who find themselves in an ID/proof of citizenship name mismatch can say the same.
Voting is a right, not a privilege. And a passport is for travel, not for voting. Again, I ask that you vote against the SAVE Act. Constituent From Fort Collins
Dear Senator Bennet: I currently live in France. I moved here recently after 27 years living in Fort Collins. I still feel very engaged with my state and with my country, and I vote in every election and in every race. I also pay taxes to Colorado and to the US Treasury.
Please do not allow this disastrous SAVE act pass. It's clearly designed to suppress votes. If it is passed, I will not be able to vote, which as a citizen I have the right to do.
As you know, Colorado has an efficient and safe voting record. It's easy, engaging, and accurate. Obviously, this scares the Republican Party, because the only way they win is by corrupting voting results. Please do not let them win this round of corruption. Constituent From Firestone, CO
Please do not support the save act and work with your colleagues to ensure this does not pass. I have been an election judge in weld county for many elections so I know personally how safe and secure our elections are. As a woman who changed my last name when I got married it is terrifying the rights that trump is insistent on removing from me. Please at least ensure I have the right to easily cast a vote as it is my constitutional right. Constituent From Breckenridge
Hello! Wanted to write and convey my deep objection to both the SAVE voter suppression act (as a woman with a daughter, it's unacceptable to put greater burden on women to vote than men . . . not to mention it's easier for a man to acquire a gun than a woman to cast a vote) as well as my objection to Markwayne Mullin, not please no!!!!! Constituent From Durango
Please vote no the Save Act. This is truly voter suppression and nothing more. We are going backwards in women's rights. Please vote no on this bill not just for my rights but for the rights of all women now and in the future.
Please vote no!!!! Constituent From Boulder
I am writing to express my strong opposition to the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act currently being considered by congress. Since voter fraud is a very rare occurrence in this country, this bill seems entirely unnecessary. Although many people seem to support the bill in order to keep non-citizens from voting, that is already covered by other laws and rarely occurs.
I am deeply concerned that this bill could interfere with mail-in voting, which I value as a civic right and believe greatly improves voter participation. I am also concerned that the additional ``paperwork'' for voter verification could disqualify valid voters, including myself. Please commit everything in your power to defeat this unnecessary, unconstitutional infringement on my voting rights. Constituent From Thornton
Good day Michael Bennet, I am a constituent from Thornton, Colorado. I urge you to vote no on the SAVE Act. This bill is a voter suppression tactic that would make it harder for eligible Coloradans to vote by requiring in-person documentation. When the government requires you to have a specific document to vote, and that document isn't free, that is essentially a poll tax which is unconstitutional and illegal per the 24th amendment and is an unnecessary burden on voters. I personally will not look kindly at any senator who votes yes on this and will be looking to vote for alternative candidates who align better with my values in the next election. Constituent From Wellington
I urge you to vote ``No'' on the SAVE Act. Voting rights would be severely abrogated if this bill passes, and many legally eligible voters would have difficulty voting. The proponents of this bill point to voter fraud caused by immigrants, but the facts are that such violations, according to the data, are extremely low.
Please do all you can to stop the SAVE Act. Constituent From Loveland
Hello, my name is Melissa Kelley. I have lived in Loveland for the last 16 years. I'm writing to you today, because I want you to vote no, on the Save Act. It is a badly hidden attempt at infringement of my voting rights. I had to show my birth certificate to get my marriage certificate, and my driver's license. I appreciate your attention on this matter. Thank you, and I hope you have a good day. Constituent From Denver
Senator Bennet: As a Colorado resident and taxpayer I am asking you to please not vote for the SAVE act, as it will disenfranchise legal voters across the state, if not the nation. Constituent From Colorado Springs
The public goal of the SAVE Act is to solve a problem that is miniscule.
It impact of the SAVE Act is to disenfranchise millions of legitimate voters: some have no passport, some have changed name (marriage/divorce) since last registration, some have moved in the year preceding an election. Most Americans do not vote in person due to transportation limits, work schedules, child care or illness.
Please do not support this legislation.
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Mr. BENNET. The Founders understood the gravity of the debate before them about who could and who could not claim the franchise. The authors of Federalist No. 52 explain that ``the definition of the right of suffrage is very justly regarded as a fundamental article of republican government.''
They wrestled with this question. They wrestled with this question. They debated it. And, ultimately, they excluded the great number of subjects who were newly made Americans, but, nevertheless, were denied, as those at Seneca Falls wrote, ``the first right of citizen.''
This was the founding generation's great mistake--this and the enslavement of Americans. And we have spent centuries working to rectify it--centuries working to rectify it.
Should the SAVE America Act pass, we will fall further away from realizing this country's promise and retread the familiar errors of the past. We should reject that vision of our democracy. We should reject that return to a history that we have fought so hard to free ourselves from. Coloradans and all Americans deserve better than this.
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