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Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, 2 weeks ago, a woman named Kristi Noem came and appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee. We had been asking her to come in and explain her management of the Department of Homeland Security for months. She said she was too busy; we knew better.

We watched one aspect of what that Department was doing with the ICE agents not only in Chicago, which I am honored to represent, but also Minneapolis.

Finally, she weakened and succumbed to our request and basically said: I will come. I will do the Senate on Tuesday, I will do the House on Wednesday, and then don't bother me for a while.

It didn't work out as she planned.

She appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee and wouldn't answer questions directly to her about the management of the Department and things she had said and done.

The Achilles' heel turned out to be a $200 million publicity stunt, which she had bilked the taxpayers out of, so that she could travel around the country by television, by social media, riding horses, appearing before Mount Rushmore, and she said the President approved it.

The next day, she appeared before the House Judiciary Committee and had a similar experience.

By the end of the day, she was finished. Two weeks ago, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, was fired by President Trump.

Clearly, there is something wrong in that Department, and it starts with ICE, this paramilitary force that showed up in the city of Chicago and across the United States and has killed at least two, maybe three innocent American citizens.

Their charge was to go after criminals who managed to sneak across our border and live in the United States. You heard the President's speech over and over again: We are going to get the ``worst of the worst.'' Remember he said that?

The terrorists, the murderers, the rapists, the criminally insane, that is what we are going after. But the record of the ICE Agency is much different. When they take a look at all of those that they have deported and taken into some kind of a holding cell, it turns out that only one out of seven have any kind of criminal record--one out of seven.

So six of the people that they are arresting and detaining and moving off to different detention camps have no criminal record at all. They are not the worst of the worst. They are folks that overstayed a visa into the United States, period.

So she came and appeared before us, and we have said repeatedly on our side, we want to work with the administration to change the standards for ICE so that they are basically the same standards that apply to your State troopers and your hometown police, basic standards of law enforcement that professionals follow. ICE is a far cry from that today, but what we are looking for are changes that makes them comply with the law and the Constitution.

There is a question of funding the Department of Homeland Security. Two weeks ago, the Democrats said: Here is our position. We will fund everything in the Department of Homeland Security, all of it, including TSA, except for ICE, and we are negotiating with the White House. Let's get it done.

Nine times we have come to the floor. Nine times Democrats have come to the floor and said we will fund the entire department, including TSA, including FEMA, including the Coast Guard. ICE, let's resolve by negotiation. We are in the middle of that right now.

Nine times the Republicans objected to that proposal from the Democrats. So to come to the floor now and blame the Democrats because people in TSA are not being paid doesn't reflect the reality and what happened on the floor. Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act

Madam President, now there is also a matter pending on the floor. I will see if I still have a copy of it here. This is the matter that is before us on the floor of the U.S. Senate. It is entitled ``SAVE America Act.'' What this proposes to do is a dramatic change in registering to vote in America.

Let me be specific. With this proposal, the proof that you have to present of your identity when you register to vote changes dramatically.

When you look at the second page of this, they start listing what you have to bring in to prove that you are eligible to vote. The first suggestion is a passport. Well, half of the people in America, roughly half, own a passport and half do not. So if you decide you want to get a passport to make sure that you or your son or daughter who has turned 18 get a chance to vote, how do you get a passport?

Well, there is an Agency of the government, the State Department, and you come and pay a filing fee of $165. You can get an expedited approval in a matter of days and weeks for an additional $60, but it is basically $165 for a passport. Let me remind you, half of the people in the United States do not have a passport.

Creating this as a standard of the election in November, can you imagine what is going to happen at the passport office? How many Americans register to vote each year? About 50 million--50 million.

How many passports are currently being issued by the Department of State without this law passing? Twenty-five million. So you are going to triple the workload at the Department of State for people who want to be registered to vote in time for November. How is that going to work? No explanation.

The second opportunity you have to prove you are really an American is to present your birth certificate. Problem: Turns out a substantial number of Americans don't have a birth certificate; they have to obtain one. And, secondly, there is a problem when the birth certificate reflects a maiden name of a woman before she was married or in a hyphenated relationship. And so there has to be a change made there.

In each State there is a cost and a time involved in that process. So this is supposed to make it easier to vote? No, not at all.

What is it that has changed in America that makes us want to dramatically change the laws on registering to vote? Well, voter fraud, according to the other side of the aisle--people who are ineligible; they don't even profess to be Americans; and they are going to try to vote.

And you say to yourself: Well, that must be a terrible problem. They say millions and millions and millions of people are involved in that. So let's take a look at the record.

From 1999 until 2023, 24 years, do you have any idea how many people who didn't have American citizenship were prepared to violate the law and try to vote? Well, each year we are talking about some 50 million people registering, 24-year period of time, the number must be huge. Seven million? No. Seven hundred thousand? No. Seventy thousand? No. Seven hundred? No.

The number is 77 people in 24 years attempted to register to vote in the United States and weren't legally American citizens. Seventy-seven of the millions that were trying to register during that period of time.

So the Republicans are proposing changing the law for everyone, no matter where you are from, no matter what your political affiliation may be for a new standard of proof. It is not necessary. In fact, to charge $165 for a passport so I can prove I can vote is in the nature of a poll tax.

What does the Supreme Court have to say about poll taxes? In the case of Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that any poll tax was unconstitutional.

The Nation had already ratified the 24th Amendment, which declared citizens' rights to vote in Federal elections ``shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.''

The Harper case involved a poll tax in the State of Virginia. The Supreme Court threw it out. Do you know how much the poll tax was in Virginia when this case was decided? One dollar and fifty cents.

Now, compare that to going out to have a passport issued to you and paying $165. That is a lot of gasoline, $165.

In striking this fee down, Justice William Douglas said, ``the right to vote is too precious, too fundamental to be . . . conditioned'' on whether somebody has $1.50 in their pocket.

Yet the Republicans are trying to make this the basic standard, a passport, the most acceptable standard under their rhetoric. Iran

Madam President, let me conclude by saying a word about the situation in Iran. We kept asking the administration what their goals were with the invasion of Iran. Do you remember the public hearings, the congressional hearings where they sent in the Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, they were interrogated by Senators and Congressmen from both political parties and asked to explain why we invaded Iran?

The reason you don't remember is because it never happened. We invaded this country without any congressional debate.

We are bound by the Constitution, which says in article I, section 8, it is Congress that declares war, and yet we have no explanation formally from this administration and no opportunity to ask basic questions.

I will close with this: 22 years ago there was a vote in this Chamber, a vote to invade Iraq. If you remember, we had a fulsome debate before that happened, and the administration under President George W. Bush explained they had weapons of mass destruction which threatened our allies and friends and even the United States, and that is why we had to invade.

I was skeptical of that. I was one of 23 Senators who voted against the invasion of Iraq 22 years ago. It was 1 Republican and 22 Democrats, we voted no. It turned out to be the best vote I ever cast. When we sent our forces in there, Saddam Hussein was swept aside quickly, and then they started looking for weapons of mass destruction and found none. None.

And here we go again. A $200 billion first appropriation for this war--$200 billion. If just a portion of that money had been saved for health insurance premiums, helping people pay them in the United States, some 24 million Americans wouldn't be facing a dramatic increase that they can't afford in their health insurance premiums. Madam President, $200 billion is what President Trump is asking for. It is time for us to have that debate we didn't have before the invasion.

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Mr. DURBIN. Smith), and the Senator from Rhode Island (Mr. Whitehouse) are necessarily absent.

The result was announced--yeas 47, nays 37, as follows: [Rollcall Vote No. 59 Leg.] YEAS--47 Banks Barrasso Blackburn Boozman Budd Capito Cassidy Collins Cornyn Cotton Cramer Crapo Cruz Curtis Ernst Fetterman Graham Grassley Hagerty Hawley Hoeven Husted Hyde-Smith Johnson Justice Kennedy Lankford Lee Lummis Marshall McConnell McCormick Moody Moran Moreno Mullin Murkowski Ricketts Risch Rounds Schmitt Scott (FL) Scott (SC) Sullivan Thune Tillis Young NAYS--37 Alsobrooks Baldwin Bennet Blumenthal Blunt Rochester Booker Cantwell Cortez Masto Duckworth Durbin Gillibrand Hassan Heinrich Hickenlooper Hirono Kim King Lujan Markey Merkley Murphy Murray Ossoff Padilla Peters Reed Rosen Sanders Schatz Schumer Slotkin Van Hollen Warner Warnock Warren Welch Wyden NOT VOTING--16 Britt Coons Daines Fischer Gallego Kaine Kelly Klobuchar Paul Schiff Shaheen Sheehy Smith Tuberville Whitehouse Wicker

The motion was rejected.

(Mr. RICKETTS assumed the Chair.)

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